


In Darkness, in the Deeps

by Maker_of_Rune_Vests



Category: Loki - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst with a Happy Ending, Atheism, Attempted Murder, Catholicism, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Gothic, Haunted House, Loki (Marvel) Angst, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Murder, Northern England, Reader-Insert, This is not anti-catholic, non-sexual parental abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-01-27 12:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 25,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21391810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maker_of_Rune_Vests/pseuds/Maker_of_Rune_Vests
Summary: A Victorian Gothic, Loki-centric AU.Autumn, Northern England, Industrial revolution. Candlelit corridors, a hidden door, veiled threats. A daughter, Helena, entombed in the family vault, possibly poisoned by her father Odom Borson, a ruthless, wealthy mill-owner. An elder son, Thornton, at college in France.  A younger son, Locke, allegedly a murderer, a madman, and dead. And you, an orphan step-niece of Mrs. Freda Borson, about to become embroiled in their family secrets.***Mr. Odom Borson=OdinMrs. Freda Borson=FriggaMiss Helena Borson=HelaMaster Thornton Borson=ThorMaster Locke Borson=Loki
Relationships: Frigga | Freyja & Loki (Marvel), Frigga | Freyja (Marvel) & Original Female Character(s), Frigga | Freyja (Marvel) & Reader, Frigga | Freyja/Odin (Marvel), Hela & Odin (Marvel), Loki & Steve Rogers, Loki & Thor (Marvel), Loki (Marvel)/Original Female Character(s), Loki (Marvel)/Reader, Odin (Marvel) & Original Female Character(s), Odin (Marvel) & Reader, Steve Rogers & Thor
Comments: 100
Kudos: 171





	1. Chapter I

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Psalm 88:6, KJV.

Although you arrived early, there is darkness beyond the windows of the long, cold foyer of Odom Borson’s mansion. A thousand fires burn in his iron mills, but very few, it seems, in his home. You shiver, your black skirts and your single carpetbag dripping slightly melted snow onto the blood-red Turkish rug. Your late father’s coachman, who had brought you here, has left a startling amount of slushy footprints on the ebony-dark floor before leaving; will it give the Borsons a poor first impression of you?. Are the they home? The footman who answered the door has left the hallway, saying that he would learn if they were. 

Mrs. Borson has said you should come this day. Your late stepmother’s sister, she has offered you a home--much needed, triply orphaned and unbetrothed as were. And you were not been meant to arrive until that night; but James, the coachman, decided to depart at five in the morning….

You shiver again, wishing the foyer were warmer and lighter. Deer’s heads mourn in the darkness above you, looking alive--save for their decapitated state. A door creaks, somewhere too your left where it is too dark to see if it was opening on closing, or if it exists. 

A man’s voice, above you. Footsteps on stairs, two persons.’ 

“...I wish for no more sentimental objections, Freda. He no longer requires the room; it is furnished; you shall place her in it. You should be grateful that I am permitting this connection of yours to join our family.” 

“I am grateful, Odom.” A woman’s voice, as soft as a piece of paper that has been crumpled in a fist a hundred times. You expect her to object again, but she does not.

Another woman laughs behind you, wryly, scarcely audibly. You start and look over your shoulder, but there is nobody; there are only the triple-barred doors. Sound must travel oddly in this foyer. You look at the stairs again and see Mrs. Borson and her husband descending them. She is a tall woman in a black crepe gown, red-gold waves of hair under a white lace cap, a sweet, sad smile, arched brows. She sees you and silently gasps in surprise. Her husband frowns, a small man in a fine black coat and gold waistcoat, with silvery white hair combed back from his forehead and a thick white moustache. “You were not supposed to arrive until this night,” he states.

“I beg your pardon,” you say quietly, your heart beginning to beat faster. You have nowhere to go if he refuses to let you stay. Your father died in debt. “My departed father’s coachman chose to leave early, despite my remonstrances.”

“It’s almost impossible to estimate arrival to a place one has never visited,” Mrs. Borson says before Mr. Borson answers. She takes her hand of his arm and lifts her skirt enough to hurry down the stairs and pull you into an embrace. “Welcome, my dear. I hope you’ll call me Aunt Freda.”

You return the embrace, glad to be welcomed, and glad to have a family member again, even if she is unrelated to you. “Thank you, Aunt Freda,” you whisper, and have to stop talking because tears are in your eyes. Since your parents died, you have often had to break sentences in the middle. 

Aunt Freda gives you a reassuring smile. “I shall be glad to have your company. Odom, meet our niece.”

He bows curtly to you and strides toward the door as you curtsey. “Delighted. I’ll return tonight at ten, Freda.” He puts a top hat on his head like a frustrated cook might put a lid on a pot, and vanishes through the doors as soon as the reentered footman opens them.

Aunt Freda leads you up the stairs, insisting on carrying your carpetbag. You wonder if the mansion is maidless; it would be very unconventional….

Three portraits hang on the wall at the top of the staircase, visible thanks to a candelabra that burns on the console under them. One of Odom Borson and one of Freda Borson; they are facing each other. And one more, facing away from them in a way that screams that there should be a fourth portrait, a beaming young man with fair hair and the form of Hercules. “My son Thornton,” Aunt Freda says, smiling up at it. “He is attending a university in France--he’ll return home at Christmas.” Her eyes flicker toward the place beside it where a fourth portrait should face it, and her smile vanishes. She walks silently, several steps down the dark hallway, and coughs quietly. “My husband and I did have another son, and while his story is not fit for a young lady’s ears, all in this shire know it.” She sighs, and then she adds, “And you will be occupying his room.”

Ah. You wince, aware that she wishes you were not--and wishing yourself that you were not. “I’m sorry, Aunt—”

“No, my dear. I cannot think of him without pain, but I am glad his room will not be empty.” A few more silent steps. The walls are covered in dark gold paper with thorny rose canes printed on it, and every ebony door is closed. “Locke was a good son,” Aunt Freda says, her voice low. “But--a brain fever--after he discovered he was by birth the...the natural son of my husband’s bitter rival…. He was judged not guilty by reason of insanity,” she says, very quickly. “But he stabbed his father in the heart, one night, and incinerated his mill--the skeleton was found in the ashes with his seal ring on his finger and my son’s letter-opener in his heart….”

You almost trip, so terrible is this story. “The mill-workers? Did they--burn?” 

She shakes her head vehemently. “No, he burnt it after they had gone home. There were five guards that night. Two escaped…. He was judged insane, and he...he died a few days after he was given into my husband’s keeping.”

You do not dare to ask why he died. Silently, you follow Aunt Freda to your room-- _ his _ room. She opens the door, revealing near blackness, and then strikes a match and begins to light the candles of another candelabra. 

A bed, covered by a heavy green velvet comforter. A stained glass window taking up most of one wall, too dark for you to understand what it is depicting. Another wall hidden by a tapestry with a terrified unicorn fleeing across a black meadow from a lion. Another with two bookcases, dark and tall, and between them a black marble fireplace and above it, on a green-papered wall, an agonized metal crucifix, that reminds you in the midst of all your unease at being in the room of a lethal madman that the Borsons are a Roman Catholic family--and that your mother had been baptized into the Roman Catholic church when she was an infant. 

You put your carpetbag down on the smooth ebony floor, where it looks like a beggar’s hat on the floor of a royal tomb. 

“I think he would be glad his room was retenanted,” Aunt Freda murmurs, blowing out the match. There are tears on her cheeks. “Half of the furnishings are from the Renaissance, or of greater antiquity. Shall I help you unpack? Our maids left ereyesterday."

“Thank you, Aunt Freda, but it will not take me long, and I should like to change,” you say, surprised at how calm you sound, and she smiles, puts a motherly kiss on your cheek, and walks away, closing the door behind her.

You pull your shoulders back and bend and open your carpet bag. Locke Borson’s story was a horrid tragedy, but that does not mean his room is fearful. It will be lovely tomorrow when the sun shines through the stained glass. Perhaps your companionship will aid Aunt Freda in recovering from her grief.

A sound above you like a woman laughing behind a fan. 


	2. Chapter II

You look up, almost stumbling, and see cobwebby hammer beams below white plaster. No woman is there, or could be. You wish you could think you were hearing your mother, but she never had sounded so sardonic. It cannot have been Aunt Freda; maids, and sound traveling strangely--no. The maids left ereyesterday. A shiver crawls up your back. 

Wishing Aunt Freda had not left for the kitchens, you unpack your few, black clothes and put them into a wardrobe that could easily hold ten carpetbags of attire. A long black merino coat hangs in it, a gentleman’s. For a moment you imagine you smell smoke--no, you do, but it is mixed with the scent of beef. You laugh quietly, realizing that you almost mistook the smell of dinner for a facet of a haunting. Not that this is a laughing matter. You wince, remembering how understandably opposed Lady Freda was to putting you here. But you cannot apologize without her suspecting that you overheard her husband gainsaying her. 

Dinner is quiet, though odd since the cook is waiting on the table. Lady Freda asks you about your pursuits, and tells you a story of Thornton winning a discus competition. You retire to your room an hour later, secretly glad that your travel-weariness means that you can be in privacy before Mr. Odom returns. 

No laughter in the room, and no smell of smoke; only darkness and your bedside candle. The bed is comfortable, but it is hard not to reflect on the fact that a year or so ago, someone slept here who the next night would madly murder. You cannot fall asleep, though you ache from carriage-riding and are too tired to read. 

The candle melts and shrinks, and the wind wuthers past the window. You wonder again what its stained glass picture is….

The door of your room swings silently open. You freeze, half-closing your eyes, pretending to be asleep. Who--why--?

Aunt Freda. You relax, but do not move. You do not want her to fret about your insomnia. 

_ What _ ? 

She walks toward the tapestry, pulls the middle open as if it were curtains over a window, there is a quiet, sliding sound--and she walks through the wall, and then there is simply tapestry. You sit up and rub your eyes, and touch the cover and your nightdress and the headboard. You are awake. 

Half a minute ago, Aunt Freda walked into a secret passageway. 

You want to spring out of bed and investigate it, but she might come back through the door, and if she had wanted you to know that there was a passageway in your bedroom, she would have told you. You lie down again, and twist a fold of the smooth sheet.

Is she running away? Involved in crime? Meeting a lover? No, this is not a Gothic novel, and your aunt is a virtuous lady. Visiting a chapel? But why would she not tell you that there was a passage to a chapel? 

Hours pass. You begin thinking of anagrams, and solving mathematical problems. The window becomes a little lighter; it must be four in the morning…. Has Aunt Freda left forever?

Footsteps, and sliding. You close your eyes and listen to her leave your room and close the door, and then, after ten minutes, you spring out of bed, wrap a shawl around your shoulders, and hurry towards the tapestry. It feels as old as trees and tombstones as you slide it to the side and reveal the unlocked pocket door. 

You slide that--it is lighter than it looks, and stare down dark stone steps. You know you should not go down them; someone giving you wise advice would advise you not to. But surely, if they led somewhere very dangerous, Aunt Freda would not have descended them and returned. And you long to know where she was, why this door is in your room, what skeletons are in your family’s closet. You pick up your candle--now only two inches long--and begin to slowly descend the stairs. 

Insects thrown down, dead, from the spiderwebs above you poke at your bare soles, and the stone wall chills and rubs the palm of your free hand. Fifteen steps down, and then you are standing on a flagstone floor. You lift your candle, looking up and around. A large, cold stone basement, or dungeon; a small barred window to your left, ahead merely pillars supporting the stone ceiling and beyond them a stone wall, to your right--bars? The right half of this space is split from the left half by a line of bars, a barred door with massive locks in the center of this cage-like row. You step closer to them, bewildered. Surely nobody would keep exotic beasts in a basement ...lions dwell in plains, bears in forests, nothing belongs in the blackness under a house in Northern England. 

A face!

You suppress a scream, utterly startled. White as snow, in the midnight on the other side of the bars, a young man stares at you unblinkingly. Back towards the stairs you step, heart slamming, hands trembling--no. He is motionless, blinkless. He--it--a waxwork. You take a deep breath and step towards the bars again, one step towards the bars, lifting your candle.

He tilts his head.

  
You start, whirl, and run up the stairs, stepping on your shawl after it flies off, and fall on your hands and knees into your room, too startled and bewildered to think. Green and gold light covers your hands, pressed against the floor, and you look up to see the stained glass window glowing, the white skeleton and the green-gowned blonde maiden both shining as they dance with each other, each with pointed toes touching the tops of the letters of the words, “ _ Memento Mori _ .” 


	3. Chapter III

Taps on the door. You scramble to your feet. “Yes?”

Aunt Freda half-opens the door and looks in with an apologetic smile. “Oh, good, you’re awake, my dear. Mr. Borson wishes to show you the family vault.”

“The--”

Aunt Freda nods and just barely sighes. “Before he leaves, which he intends to do at seven. He believes everyone should rise at dawn. I’ll let you dress.”

“Thank you for coming to wake me,” you say before she closes the door, and quickly dress. It is odd indeed that Mr. Borson wishes to show you the family tomb at six o’clock in the morning, but what you saw in the basement is so much odder that you barely wonder why he wishes you to see it so expeditiously.

Did you see a ghost, or a man in a cage? You are certain you saw one or the other. You have never hallucinated, never thought you saw a ghost even when in a dark room after reading ghost stories. But you believe in ghosts--and if a madman who committed murder died here, one would  _ expect _ him to haunt the house. Perhaps that was a cage built to confine him, and the place where he had died.

As you speedily brush your hair you frown at both the horror and the sadness of this possibility. 

But--you could have seen a living man. It must have been Locke Borson, if you did; surely nobody else would be caged under the Borson’s home. And it would explain Aunt Freda’s descent of the secret stairs; Aunt Freda would visit a living son, but you doubt she would spend hours with a ghost.

Or, possibly, she would.

You realize as you reach for your shawl that it flew off as you ran up the stairs. If Aunt Freda--or Mr. Borson!--sees it, they will know you found a man whom, living or dead, you are certain they did not want you to find. You must go down the stairs again, before tonight. Your stomach twists as you decide it, but you cannot think about it, let alone do it, at the moment. Mr. Borson is waiting for you, and he seems as if he is someone who would wait impatiently.

He is frowning as you walk quickly towards him in the dining room. “I hope you passed a restful night,” he says stiffly, visibly not hoping that. His right eye is glass; it does not stare disapprovingly at your fraying hem like his left eye does. “Come, you ought to know the heritage of this family. Since my wife has chosen to add you to it.”

Aunt Freda’s smile neither grows nor shrinks. 

“Yes, Mr. Borson,” you say meekly, because arguing with him or speaking harshly to him would be inappropriate and perilous. “Thank you.”

He nods briskly, and sets off at a very quick pace, toward the other end of the hall. You follow him, looking back over your shoulder once at Aunt Freda. She nods, and you stride faster, walking just a few feet behind Mr. Borson.

He leads you out of the dining hall and into a stone corridor with besmirched red and gold tapestries hanging on the walls--jacquard roses and ravens--and a dusty floor with evidence of mice and of footprints. At the end he shoves open pointed-arched double doors. The hinges scream like tormented souls. 

Inside is a dusty chapel, a crucifix as tall as you are over a long altar with candles on it. The dust on the bases of their sticks is higher than their wicks are long, but from the door to the altar is a row of small woman’s footprints, and there is a dusted space immediately in front of it, as if a kneeling person’s clothing had cleaned the floor there. In the middle of this space is a drying but half-fresh bouquet of white roses, and one other object in the room is dustless: a tall, round golden box. 

Mr. Borson kicks the roses away. Under them is the ring of a trap door. He grips it and heaves the stone panel up, and gestures. “Look down; we need not descend.” 

With an uneasy imagining of his kicking you into the vault like he kicked the roses away from it, you walk to the opposite side of the trapdoor from his and look down. Gelid air, sucked up out of the vault by the lifting trapdoor, penetrates your shoes. A rectangular tomb lies directly below the opening, a cross carved on top of it and above the cross the name “Helena Borson.” Below the cross are the dates of her life. She died twenty-five years ago, when she was twenty-three. You look up at Mr. Borson, ready to be sympathetic. “Your sister, sir?” 

“My daughter,” he enunciates, without looking at you. His eye is fixed on the tomb, as if her name and dates were a foreign language he is attempting to translate. “She wished to take over control of my mills--insinuated that I was aging and unfit!” He lowers the trapdoor again, almost slamming it. “She died shortly after beginning to stir up a strike among my workers.” Mr. Borson finally looks at you, neither smiling nor sad. His shoulders are so straight that you notice it, as if he were posing for a drawing in a pamphlet on proper posture. “My enemies never thrive.” 

Uneasily, you clasp your hands in front of you and look down at the black sleeves of your mourning dress. It would be ridiculous for a gentleman to hint that he had caused his daughter’s death...would it not? But Aunt Freda says that Locke Borson died a few days after being put in Mr. Borson’s custody. And he haunts the house...or she was lying…. 

Mr. Borson is striding towards the door. “I would have turned this room into a library long ago, were it not for my wife,,” he comments. “We need no chapel, and Helena would not have wished to be buried in consecrated ground. She was, and I am, a skeptic.”

“I was under the impression that the Borson family is Roman Catholic,” you venture.

He looks back at you. “I altered that. But as I told you, Mrs. Borson refuses to renounce her fantasies, religious and superstitious.” He turns fully around, raising his forefinger. “If I find that you are aiding her in her rites or corroborating her inventions, I will reconsider permitting you to dwell here. Do you understand me?”

“I do, sir,” you say quietly. You do not want to live under the protection of a man who would take you to his daughter’s tomb a little after dawn, hint that he killed her, and threaten to cast you out, to understate. But you need a place to live. You accompany him back to the dining room, saying “yes” when he says the house has some of Northern England’s best architecture and “I should be delighted to meet him” when he says that Thornton Borson will be coming home for Christmas. You find yourself leaning towards the hypothesis that the man you saw in the basement is Locke’s ghost. 

You must return there, today, and reclaim your shawl. Mr. Borson leaves, his footsteps sounding as if he is marching as he walks toward the front doors; you and Aunt Freda eat breakfast, both looking tired; and you walk back to your room. You feel more and more ill as you approach it; ghost-seeking has never been an appealing pursuit to you. But Aunt Freda and especially Mr. Borson must not know that you found the door.

You lock your bedroom door behind you, light a candle, and slide the tapestry away from the door. It is open, and your heart jolts for an instant--but naturally it is open. You didn’t close it after falling into your room. You take a deep breath and begin to walk down the steps, one at a time. Everything is silent, and the basement at the foot of the steps is almost sunny; the sun must be coming through the small window you saw before you saw the ghost. You blow out your candle and descend the next steps at the speed you usually would.

As you reach the last step, you look towards the caged half of the room, and draw in your breath sharply.

Your shawl drapes from the outstretched hand of the man you saw the night before, who is looking at you through the bars, extending it for you to take. One of his black brows rises, as if he is asking you why you are standing stiffly on the lowest step, eyes wide, instead of accepting the shawl. His voice quiet and cultivated, he says, “I believe you dropped this.” 


	4. Chapter IV

After a long moment, you manage to speak. “...Mr. Locke Borson?”

He laughs so softly that if there had been any other fragment of sound in the basement, it would have been inaudible. “I have not used those names for a year.” He looks at the shawl and then up at you again. “This is yours, is it not?”

“Yes.” You step onto the floor and cautiously walk towards him. He is not a ghost, but he is a murderer, and mad--according to his mother--and it seems unwise to get within arms length of him. 

Locke sighs. “Catch.”

The shawl suddenly flies toward you, quite accurately and rather faster than you would have thought soft cloth could be thrown. You automatically catch it. “Thank you.” You wrap it around your shoulders; the basement is frigid. Is it always so cold? Locke is not shivering, but he must be chilled. His face and hands are as deathly white as his shirt; after tossing you the shawl, he folds his arms tightly, his eyes fixed on your face.

The bars, the windowlessness, the unrelieved stone of the floor, the walls, and the ceiling--all of these are manifest, but now, knowing instinctively that he has folded his arms because he is cold, you shift from bewilderment to absorbing that beneath your step-aunt’s house, a person--a person with an immortal soul, a person who can think, a person who can suffer from icy temperatures--is in a black-barred cage. 

If he wished to draw you closer to harm you, he would not have tossed you the shawl while you were still three yards away, you reason, and you walk to within a normal speaking distance. “I could fetch your coat, sir. I’ve been put in your room--it’s in my--in your wardrobe.”

Faint, surprised lines appear between his brows. “Thank you. But I am in possession of one--I merely grow weary of wearing it.” He smiles wryly. “What is life without variety?” You look past him and see a shelf of books, a bed, a chest, a table, and a chair. No wonder he considers changing from warm to cold variety worth having! “If I may ask--” You look up at him again. “If I may ask, why would you trouble yourself?” You blink. ‘You seem cold,’ would be the answer, but surely he knows he seems cold, or at least that it is cold enough here that you could not be oblivious to it. Before you say it, he asks, his head tilted curiously, “Are you one of those who advocate for the rights of murderers? A campaigner for the mad?” His fingers clench around one of the bars. 

You almost take a step back. “I’m--I’m not anything,” you hear yourself say. “I--” You brush hair back from your face with both hands. “I came here yesterday, and they said you were dead, but--and this your fath-er-”

“He is not my father.” Locke slices your sentence in half. “He threatened you?”

You nod. “He took me to your s-- to Miss Helena Borson’s tomb, and he hinted that he had murdered her. And then warned me not to support his wife’s beliefs.” You twist the edge of your shawl around your finger. “I do not understand why he would hint that,” you say, thinking aloud. “Why does he not anticipate my alerting the law?”

Locke laughs. “Will you?”

“I--should,” you realize. Bewilderment sweeps over you. Why did you not plan that already? How were you so chilled and astounded that you forgot morality? You pull your shoulders back and stand straighter. “I will,” you declare. 

“How, exactly?” Locke begins to pace from one end of the front of his cell to the other, arms still folded. “Nearly all justices and officers of the law in this shire are indebted to him--not that that is of significance. You have no way of reaching the village.”

“I could walk."

He shakes his head, still pacing. “Ten miles in winter? No, you’ll never leave this house.” He pauses, where he was when you began talking, looks down at you, and says softly, “He would not have allowed my mother to give you a home here, sans planning that.”

“Do you….” The floor feels as if it is tilting. You fold your hands. “The maids left, yesterday.”

Locke’s brows rise. “Presumably Mother thinks them alive and in good health.” Yes, the floor is tilting. You grip one of the bars of the cage and take a deep breath. “But should you find freshly disturbed earth--don’t dig.”  _ Oh _ . Perhaps he’s lying. But you do know that Odom Borson hinted to you that he had murdered his own daughter…. “I didn’t retrieve your shawl for diversion. It fell near my cage and I took it and hid it, to save your life.”

You stand immobile, trying to think instead of panic, trying to doubt Locke. His mother said he was mad. But--you come back to the hinting at Helena’s vault. “I must not let him know that I know you are alive. Or that your mother visits you?”

“Or--” There is a very faint sound above, the front doors opening and closing. Locke’s eyes fix on the ceiling. “He is home--go. Now.”

You nod and obey, scurrying away up the stairs and through the door. Silently, you close it, smooth the tapestry, and sit down on the bed. 

Mr. Borson is vociferating in the foyer. 


	5. Chapter V

The maids’ room is unlocked because it is lockless, a cold room directly above yours. You swing the door open and slowly close it behind you, turning Mr. Borson’s shouts from a distant roar to quiet, occasional sounds. Locke may be malicious or mad, fabricating or fantasizing that his father is a serial murderer. But no good man would hint at having killed his daughter, or intimidate a girl who had done nothing save move invited to his house. Justice demands that you attempt to discover the maids’ fate, and alert the powers of the law if it was not merely the loss of their positions. 

The room is orderly. Perhaps they did tidy it and leave, regretting the loss of employment but safe and sound, on their way to a house with less darkness. 

A shoelace meanders out from between the white coverlet’s edge and the floor.

Your heart leaps into your throat, a horrible image flashing into your mind of a dead maid wasting under the bed, work-roughened hands changing to bones. No, no, the room does not smell like decomposition. You force yourself to quietly walk to the bed, bend and take hold of the coverlet, and lift it. The boots are alone.

But why did she leave them under her bed? They look so new that even a lady would not have left them. Reluctantly, you walk toward the chest of drawers and pull the first one open. Stockings. The next down. Underthings.

Sickness rises in your throat. You stand very still, attempting to believe that Mr. Borson did nothing worse than force the maids to leave so quickly that they left their garments behind. It’s possible.

You hear your name and find yourself whirling around with a muffled scream. Aunt Freda stands a few feet behind you, staring at the chemises and petticoats with wide, horrified eyes. Then her expression clears, as if she dashed this evidence off over her consciousness and conscience and let it fall. “I didn’t realize he hurried them so in leaving,” she says ruefully, and you are certain that four seconds ago she knew her husband had killed the women who slept in this room and that now she truly no longer knows that. You shudder, and she steps forward and touches your cheek with a gentle, warm hand. “You look pale, my dear. Why are you here in the maids’ room?”

“Exploring,” you manage, and make yourself smile. “I’m inquisitive.”

Aunt Freda laughs softly, and then frowns, looking again at the linens. “I do wish I had a way to send these after them, but I doubt they remained in the town….” 

You also doubt it. “Why did he discharge them, Aunt Freda?” you ask. 

“They would not cease speaking of hearing whispers,” she answers quietly, walking over to the window and opening the curtains. Outside, snow has begun falling. Aunt Freda looks up into the snowing clouds, a lock of golden hair falling against her cheek. “Despite his warnings that if they wished to serve here, they must not claim to hear them. He trod on the floor Martha was scrubbing, and she termed him a murderer. When he asked her how she dared say that, she said the whispers had told her--and Sarah corroborated. And so Mr. Borson discharged them, and--as our coachman, Hemsell, was indisposed--drove them to the town himself.” She sighs. “I presumed he let them take their belongings, but I see he did not.” 

“It seems he did not,” you say softly. “Is the town far away?”

“Ten miles.” Aunt Freda turns away from the window and smiles at you. “Why?”

You manage to return her smile. “Only curiosity, Aunt Freda.” Her story must be incomplete. Mr. Borson would not have hinted that he killed Helena to you if he were as sensitive about people suspecting it as this story indicated. “Whom did they think he had murdered?”

Aunt Freda sits on the nearest bed, tracing the veins on her left hand. “There was an inquiry after Helena’s death—but my husband was acquitted. It was a formality. But Sarah and Martha were fascinated by the scandal—and then, Sarah—Sarah spoke of another rumor, too. A worse one, not fit for you to hear.” She holds out both hands to you, and you let her have yours. “Be happy here, my dear. Do not seek rumors and do not believe them. My husband has as many rumors about him as he has virtues.”

You nod, silently, and sit beside your aunt. She will be kind to you, but she will not help you investigate her husband’s crimes, nor will she help you bring them to the attention of the law. “You must miss your daughter,” you say quietly.

Aunt Freda shakes her head. “She was not mine; indeed, I scarcely met her. She died a few weeks after my Mr. Borson began to call on me. I heard that she was a great beauty, and a mathematical genius. She died in her sleep, of a weak heart.” 

Living in this place might well weaken the heart, you think as the day drags on, though you highly doubt that is what Helena died of. You eat an uncomfortable luncheon, at which Mr. Borson’s anger fills the air and mixes with the scent of under-cooked stew; you spend an afternoon helping Aunt Freda untangle yarn and wind it into balls--which would be pleasant if Mr. Borson were not glaring at a newspaper a yard or two away; you eat an uncomfortable dinner; you retire at nine.

In the candlelit upstairs corridor, the three portraits stare at you as you walk past them. You stare back at Mr. Borson’s for a moment, and feel your hands shaking a little. You must--you must let the law know that Martha and Sarah disappeared. 

“Beware.” A soft whisper, so soft that you turn, unstartled, expecting to see Aunt Freda and already about to ask of what. But she has not followed you. The corridor goes onto the end of the other wing of the house, with darkness alone in it. You swallow hard. You have always been sound-minded. You do not hear voices, and this was not wind, or the house creaking.

You simply wish that there were not three possibilities for what murdered spirit whispered that. 

Without looking back, you walk past the portraits and into your room, where you stare at the tapestry for a few minutes before donning your nightdress and lying down. You would like to speake to Locke again, in part because there is nobody else to whom you can speak of murder or of how you might expose it, in part because he intrigues you, in part because you pity him, barred in, alone. But Aunt Freda may well visit her son again tonight, and she clearly desires you to remain ignorant of his living state. Was Locke’s extantness the other rumor of which Sarah spoke? But why would that be a worse rumor than Helena’s murder? A man would be punished for killing his daughter, but he would not be punished for imprisoning a mad son whom the court had put in his custody. 

You stare at the ceiling, overwhelmed by mysteries and danger and pity for dead women and a caged man. 


	6. Chapter VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter.

An hour after the sun rises, Odom Borson gallops over the snowy moor towards the town. Through one of the almost-clear panes in the stained-glass skeleton’s foot, you see him gallop away, his horse charcoal against the ankle-deep snow. Aunt Freda mentioned a coachman, so that is not the only horse here. You dart toward the closet and put on your heaviest woolen gown. 

Aunt Freda having mentioned at breakfast that Mr. Borson intends to return after dinner, you return to your room, lock the door, and slide the tapestry away. Mr. Borson is away; a horse is unused; you have seen that the maids left all of their belongings, and you heard Mr. Borson’s threat. You solely need directions to town.

Far more quickly than the first or second times, you descend the stairs.

Locke is sitting on the floor near the bars, a gargantuan book on his lap. He looks up with a spark of avid surprise as you reach the floor, and rises, closing the book and setting it on a table. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

You do not hesitate to walk within speaking distance. “I was wondering, Mr.—” You stop short, remembering that he does not wish to be called Borson. But it feels odd not to call him by a name. “May I have a name to call you by?” 

He tilts his head, looking at you as if he is attempting to deduce why you want one. “On one condition.”

“Yes?”

“That you call on me often enough to require one.” He gives you a slight, wry smile, but his voice and his eyes are both dreadfully serious. The condition is not flirtation or charm.

Will you come often? To visit a madman? To visit someone whose living state you suspect the maid Sarah was killed for knowing of?

You realize that you will. For him, because he is alone. For yourself, because he believes you. “I shall.”

His eyes brighten, despite the dark circles under them. “Call me Loki.”

“After the Norse god?” You expected him to tell you a middle name, or something of that sort.

“Is it not fitting? A mad murderer imprisoned beneath the earth?” He gestures gracefully up and around, his smile too lively for someone describing themselves as he is. “And would to God”—his voice becomes a snarl “—I could make it quake!” 

“Quake” echoes faintly off the stone walls. 

You shiver. “You can, if you’ll help me,” you say. It comes out quieter than you meant it to.

“Help you? How?” He looks at you as if if has just told him an interesting but baffling riddle, fury shifted into curiosity. 

“By giving me directions to town.” He lifts his hand, as if to make you pause, but you keep explaining. “I believe you are right about the maids. All of their belongings are left in their room. And I know Mr. Borson implied to me that he murdered Helena. So I must find an officer of the law and tell him all of this, so he can investigate if the maids are in town, and seek their….”

“Remains,” Loki says dryly.

“Remains, if they are not. Mr. Borson left on horseback not long ago; he owns a carriage, which means he must own another horse; and I can ride. I simply need directions to town.”

Loki shakes his head. “Your plan would be entirely inefficacious. Too much money changes hands between Odom Borson and the local law for them to so much as playact investigating the disappearance of his maids. They scarcely seem to have investigated Helena’s death, from all I’ve been able to learn of it--and she was his heiress. As I told you, he is too mighty for you to oppose.” 

You realize that you are unravelling a loose thread from your black lace cuffs. “Might does not make right.”

“It merely crucifies it.”

Your breath catches. He wholly believes you are putting your life in danger if you tell the law that Odom Borson is a homicide. But if you do not, who will? “If you tell me the way to the town, then at least I won’t become lost,” you say quietly, apologetically. 

Loki sighs. “Ride out of the front gate, turn right, and remain on the road.”

You nod and pull your shoulders back. “Thank you. I must hurry, but I will return and tell you how I fared.”

He says nothing, and you smile apologetically and turn to ascend the stairs.

“Wait.” You turn back. Loki has stepped closer to the bars. “I do not know your name.” You tell him, and hurry up the stairs. 


	7. Chapter VII

Your plan is going well. Aunt Freda hoped you would have a pleasant walk, the stable was not locked, the coachman was not in it, and the horse is gentle, a dapple-grey mare with a charcoal mane. She canters out of the stable and down the road, hoofbeats loud enough that you hope Aunt Freda is doing something that makes a great deal of noise, although you cannot imagine her doing anything that would. You huddle under your cloak, squinting as sunlight reflects off the snow on the moor.

Ten miles to the town. Forget-me-not sky. The frigid wind blows through your hair and makes tears flow from your eyes, and you hear gravel flying behind you and falling. You stroke the horse’s neck and plan your words. You must both tell the truth without exaggeration, and convince the officers of the law to seek the maids. 

The maids. If they are dead, when did Mr. Borson kill them? How? You do not want to know, or picture the shallow graves you begin to imagine. A few days ago there were two women who dusted your--Loki’s--shelves, who walked down the dark corridors of the Borson mansion, who owned boots and kept them under their beds. They are cast out without belongings or references--or they are dead. You wince, processing again why you are cantering toward a town you have never seen, and urge the mare into a gallop. 

And why would he kill for knowing his son is alive, but hint that he killed his daughter? Why?

A horseman ahead, a silhouette, riding in the opposite direction. You look straight ahead, certain he will not know you. He might think it is indecorous for a young lady to be galloping toward town alone, but since he cannot know you, you will not be embarrassed. 

You are a few yards away from him, and his horse’s hooves and your horse’s hooves are sounding as if they are trying and failing to be in sync, when he shouts your name in a blood-freezingly familiar voice.

A heartbeat later, before you even look up, Odom Borson’s black-gloved hand half crushes your right wrist. Startled, heart pounding, you try to wrest your wrist out of out of his hand, and he twists it, making you cry out and freeze. Your horses have stopped. The two of you stare at each other, your wrist compressed in his hand, his eye probing you. “Horse theft? I would not have thought my wife’s relatives were low enough to commit  _ that _ crime.”

“I merely wished for a ride, sir,” you say very quietly, looking down. You must not let him know that you were riding into town. “I rode often at home….” A lump rises in your throat. 

“And did my wife give you permission to ride alone, galloping across the moor like an Amazon?”

She did not, so you begin to sob. Agents of justice do not weep--and wailing women cannot explain why they were galloping away. Mr. Borson lets go of your wrist and pulls the mare’s reigns out of your hands, using them as a lead for her, and sets off home at a canter. You hold on, thinking of every cause of woe you have lest you cease crying before reaching Aunt Freda who might-- _ might _ \--tell him she gave you permission to go. You begin hiccuping, unintentionally, and Mr. Borson’s jaw clenches. 

You are stopping crying and sniffing when the coachman takes the horses and Mr. Borson takes your arm and half-drags you into the foyer. “Freda! What is the story behind this?”

You look pleadingly at your aunt as she hurries into the room, holding up her black skirt enough to nearly run. “Of what, Odom? My dear, what happened?”

“Your niece has attempted to commit horse theft. Unless you gave her permission to gallop towards town like a wild woman?” 

“I thought the exercise would benefit her!” Aunt Freda says immediately. So much startled appreciation floods through you that you almost sigh with relief. You raise your hand to wipe tears off your cheeks, and wince. Lifting your hand hurts badly, worse than any injury you have had since the time you sprained your ankle. “Did you not ask her, Odom--my dear, your wrist!”

It is red and beginning to swell.

“She fell from the horse,” Mr. Borson says crisply. “Clearly, she deceived you regarding her riding experience. She is not to ride the horses again; I shall lock the stables.” He strides toward the staircase, saying without turning around, “I am bound for London, to meet with my banker.” 

He ascends the stairs, walks into the dark corridor, and out of sight. You shiver. He thinks you were simply riding; he believed Aunt Freda. But he is angry with you. And reaching town will be hard indeed to do now.

Oh, your wrist hurts. “Thank you, Aunt Freda,” you say very quietly, sitting down on the nearest bench and laying your wrist on your lap. 

Aunt Freda sits beside you and touches your wrist, looking at it with a troubled frown. “I am glad you were not injured more severely, my dear. I believe you should immerse that in cool water, and rest.” 

“Yes, Aunt,” you say, and lightly kiss her cheek before cupping your wrist with your other hand and standing up. You do not know if she knows her husband hurt your wrist, or if she guesses you were not merely frivolously galloping, but now you know that she will guard you.

She gives you a tired smile, and you walk up the staircase and into your room, flinching each time you take a step. You try bending your wrist and muffle a cry. It does not bend much, and trying to bend it hurts appallingly.

And you failed to tell anyone of what you fear Odom Borson did. You stare at Death and the maiden as you sit on your bed and soak your wrist in your washbasin. Guilt and entrapment and pain play ring-around-the-rosy in your mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference: http://www.luckypony.com/articles/horse_long_gallop.htm


	8. Chapter VIII

The water, encompassing your feverish wrist, warms. Odin marches down the staircase. The light through the window turns golden, making the maiden’s hair the shade of your aunt’s and her gown almost chartreuse and the skeleton look as if his bones were dipped in molten gold. 

You carry the washbasin back to its stand, awkwardly holding it with your left hand and right arm, hesitate for a moment, lock your door, and slide the secret door open. For the first time you look up at the doorframe, and see holes as big as a coin, three of them, as if large nails had been stabbed through the frame and the door so the latter could not slide. Did Aunt Freda remove them? And does Odom Borson still think them present? That would explain why he wished you to have this room despite the door; he would not have expected you to find and use a door that was nailed shut.

You walk slowly down the stairs, pulling your cuff over your wrist. Even the feeling of the cuff sliding is painful. 

Loki is nowhere in sight. Irrationally, you wonder if he has escaped. No--he is asleep on his bed, his pose improbably hinting that he crumpled onto it, rather than purposely lying down to rest. His face is half-buried in his pillow, his lashes black against his pallid cheek. You quietly clear your throat. “Loki?”

He sits up astonishingly quickly, eyes wide, and then sees you and stands, brushing his disorderly hair back from his face. “I take it the officers of the law were adverse to perturbing the town’s only noteworthy tax-payer?”

You shake your head. “I met Mr. Borson before I reached town--and now the stables are locked. Aunt Freda told him she had let me ride for my health.”

“And what did he tell her befell your wrist?” Loki asks crisply. He has walked toward the bars, and now he extends his hand to you from between them. “May I ensure it is unfractured?”

“He said I fell.” You hesitate, looking up at him. He stabbed his father with the hand into which he wishes you to put your inflamed wrist. What if his concern for you is subterfuge? You have heard of those who kill many times, men who are like Venus flytraps, luring and then killing and then luring and then killing. But if he wished to harm you, he already could have--he could have grabbed your wrist easily, by now. You were close enough to touch, the other day. 

He blinks, his lips pressing together and begins to pull his hand back, but you pull your cuff up a few inches and give him your wrist, wincing not from fear but simply from the fact that though he takes it as carefully as anyone could, it is in a state in which anyone touching it would hurt. His hands are icy. 

He touches the bruises cautiously, as lightly as one would touch poppy petals, lines between his brows. “Can you bend it?”

“A little, but it’s--it’s painful.” 

He releases your wrist, and folds his arms. Again, he is not wearing a coat. You wish he would. And you wish he had held your wrist a little longer. Did--why did you just think that?

You feel an inapropos blush spreading across your cheeks as he says, “Unbroken. Though remarkably bruised. Odom Borson has a strong grip for a man so aged.” His mouth twists bitterly. 

Distantly, a woman laughs. You and Loki both look up, both knowing that Aunt Freda, that his mother, laughs less deeply. “Are there any female servants here?” you ask, barely loudly enough for him to hear. 

“No. Not now. No, Helena’s been laughing as long as I’ve lived.” He says it as if he were saying, “I’ve had black hair as long as I’ve lived” or “The house is stone.” 

You stare at him. “Her ghost?” A hair tickles the back of your neck, and you look behind you and see nothing but the empty basement and the small window. 

“The ghost of her voice.” You turn back. Loki shrugs slightly. “I’ve never seen her--and I certainly tried. It’s an open secret that Fa--Odom Borson smothered her.” 

“And is too powerful to be convicted, or tried again?” Your voice is hesitant. You think you are comprehending this tragedy, but you are not certain.

“Precisely,” Loki returns, with neither disgust nor appreciation. 

You let out your breath, and nod. “Then why is he determined to hide that you are alive and--here? What could he possibly suffer, if people knew of you?”

The corner of Loki’s mouth quirks up. “I apologize for having no chair to offer you,” he says. “But the floor is dry….”

This must be a complex saga. You kneel and then sit, a process that would be much easier if your right wrist were not unuseable. The floor is as cold as if a winter’s worth of snow had just been blown off of it. You curl your legs under you and pul your shawl up over your head as well as around your shoulders.

Loki gracefully sits on the floor on his side of the bars, one knee bent up and the other leg straight. He is trembling slightly, probably from cold, but his lopsided smile is the sort of smile he would give you were he about to narrate an amusing anecdote while sitting with you at the side of a ballroom. “Because I am dead,” he begins, “Odom inherited my...father’s...estate.”

“ _ Oh _ ,” you say, and then a few moments later remember to close your mouth. “Forgive me, but--I thought--”

“That committing parricide would transfer the estate to one’s next relative. And that I am a bastard. You are correct. But I am siblingless, and Borson persuaded the law to permit me to inherit. And, by legal adoption, he is my next of kin.” 

“If you were known to be alive, would it be yours?” 

“If I were presently competent, yes. And I am. He knows that, however much he pretends to see madness in me on his visits!” The word “visits” rips out of his mouth, his hands clenching.

You nod, watching him with sympathy and with two questions growing in your mind. Was he ever mad, or was he a deliberate murderer--or was he falsely accused? And why has Odom Borson not killed him?

“If I may ask--why has he not killed you?”

He looks up at you sharply. “Oh, very good! …Were I to die inexplicably, Mother would publicize his crimes--and, as her brother is in the House of Lords, Borson would find that distinctly problematic.” 

You trace a seam in your skirt, understanding but puzzled.”Why has she not yet publicized them? At least one woman has been murdered--seemingly three--.”

“I infer that she believes her husband would kill me if she accused him.. And so she will consent to neither the law nor herself knowing them.” He brushes a lock of hair out of his eyes and looks at you, head tilted. “Shall I shut the door of the family closet before the last of the skeletons make a dash for freedom?” 

You look down at your wrist. “One more skeleton. Were you mad, at all? And did you kill them?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference: https://www.thompsons-scotland.co.uk/blog/33-main/2975-what-happens-if-your-executor-is-your-murderer


	9. Chapter IX

Loki hesitates. “Yes, to both questions.” He traces the corner of one of the floor’s stones. “I was mad. And I killed.” He looks at you, unblinking as he often is; you cannot tell if he is watching you like a scientist watching a combination of chemicals, or watching you and fearing that you will no longer speak with him. 

You nod, unsurprised though grave. “Will you tell me what occurred?” you ask, your voice soft.

“I recall intending to kill him. And I recall being certain I would not be caught.” His tone is as bitter as winter. He rises, and begins to pace back and forth, hands behind his back. “The corner of his mouth quirks up mirthlessly. “Do you care to guess how I know I was mad?”

You stand up, and brush dust off your black skirt, but do not answer. 

“I failed to consider my letter-opener’s engravings...of my initials.”

“Ah,” you breathe. That would not prove most people mad. But you can credit that Loki would not commit murder with a monogrammed blade if sane. “And the fire?”

Loki steps out of rhythm. “I cannot remember setting it.” He looks ahead of him at nothing, scratching his palm. “I told him that like abandoned morals, abandoned children send one to Hell, stabbed him in the heart; and the next moment I recall, the mills were blazing behind me and I was screaming some lines of Dante to the smoke-choked skies…. ”

Your mouth is dry, your mind picturing his silhouette against the flames, the screams of the guards like a Greek chorus. 

“Enough skeletons?” He turns and walks straight toward the bars, his eyes frenetically bright. 

“Yes,” you hear yourself whisper. Your knees tremble. 

“You are afraid.” His right hand wraps around one of the bars, his eyes piercing through you. “And you were not, before. Despite having been told I was a murderer. Why?” 

This is not something of which you should have asked him to speak. You should have let him close the closet door, should have helped him bar it. “You seem unrepentant,” you whisper, but that is not why you are afraid. No, it is because you can imagine him with a knife in his hand, with a torch in his hand now, now that his voice is bitter and his eyes are feverish, and you could not when he was handing you your shawl. 

“There’s no repentance in hell,” he hisses, his knuckles paling. You take a step back, though you do not think he desires to hurt you. No, it is more as if you had tossed a spark at a fuse, and now saw fire dancing on dynamite. If he could make this house a pile of stone with Odom Borson crushed under it, you have not the slightest doubt that he would. “But you.” A short, sharp sigh, and he speaks more gently. “An angel should not converse with the damned. Go.”

He turns away, his back toward you, tangling dark hair, sharp shoulder-blades under his dark waistcoat. 

“I am not an angel, and you are not damned,” you say, your voice shaking.

He picks up a book, upside down, and walks toward the back of his cell, toward his bed. Still facing away from you, he sits down on the edge of the bed and flips through the upside-down pages. It is too dark, that far back in the cell, for reading.

You bite your lip, the floor cold through the soles of your shoes, and then quietly ascend the stairs, feeling like a cruel interrogator. 

Dinner, left-handedly eaten. Two hours of reading Blake as Mr. Borson talks at Aunt Freda and the sun sinks. 

You do not light your candle when you lie down in Loki’s room, or undress. Your wrist is hurting too much for you to wish to do anything that needs two hands. You lie on top over the covers, tense from the cold, and close your eyes, wishing you could forget how feverish Loki’s were after you insisted he tell you of his perdition’s origin. 

And the maids are murdered, and the stables are locked. 

Walk ten miles in winter? Write a letter? How would you send a letter to an officer of the law without Mr. Borson noticing?

You fall into a painful sleep. 

_ A woman sits on the end of your bed, beautiful and without fragility. Her dark hair flows to her waist. She is braiding it and looking over her shoulder at you as if she thinks you insufficient. “He will kill you,” he says. “And--unlike the sappy boy below us--I don’t long for a closer acquaintance with you. Leave.” _

_ You sit up. “I cannot leave. I’m penniless. Who are you?” _

_ She ties the end of her braid with a green ribbon, laughing, unhappily, the sort of laugh that is heard distantly in a house where nobody alive is mirthful.  _

_ And then she falls backward onto the bed, so she is lying face up beside you, and she becomes sickeningly still. Her eyes stare up at the ceiling, and small red lines particulate the whites of them like sensitive skin cracking after too much handwashing in winter. _

_ She is dead. _

_ You scream. _

  
  


“What is the MEANING of this?!”

Helena is not lying smothered on your bed, but her father, her murderer, is shouting outside your door. You freeze as the door opens--but only Aunt Freda speeds in, the gold buttons of her dressing-gown in the wrong buttonholes. “My dear!”

“I had a nightmare,” you say. “I’m sorry.”

You hear Mr. Borson walking--almost thudding--away. Aunt Freda sits on the edge of your bed and smooths your hair, her hand as warm and gentle as your mother’s was. “Shall I stay until you sleep again?”

“If--unless you are tired, please stay.” You are afraid to look around the room and do not want to be alone.

Aunt Freda gives you a reassuring smile and you half-close your eyes, making yourself breathe calmly. It was a dream. You have heard laughter; Loki told you Helena was smothered; you put these together in your dream. Only a dream. 

_ _ Aunt Freda hums “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel,” still smoothing your hair. So kind, so loyal; so without veracity….“Thank you for staying,” you whisper, and bury your face in your pillow, your mind pendulating from Helena’s bloodshot eyes to Loki’s turned back. Death; pain; death; pain; death.

Your wrist throbs. You sigh and make yourself recite the words of “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel” in your mind, regardless of their being too tragic and Helen’s name being too similar to Helena. 

_ Curst be the heart, that thought the thought, _

_ And curst the hand, that fired the shot, _

_ When in my arms burd Helen dropt, _

_ And died to succour me! _

_ O think na ye my heart was sair, _

_ When my love dropt down and spak nae mair! _

_ There did she swoon wi' meikle care, _

_ On fair Kirconnell Lea…. _

_ O Helen fair, beyond compare! _

_ I'll make a garland of thy hair, _

_ Shall bind my heart for evermair, _

_ Untill the day I die…. _

You drift to sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References: http://www.exploreforensics.co.uk/suffocating-and-smothering.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Kirkconnel


	10. Chapter X

“I apologize for intruding after you told me to go,” you mouth silently, pacing back and forth across your room as the sun drops like a comet, “but I have tried three times to write a letter exposing Mr. Borson’s crimes with my left hand, and I cannot--will you please write on my behalf?” You sigh and rest your head against the wall as you reach it. “And advise me as to how to send it without Mr. Borson opening it?”

You anticipate that Loki will help you with the letter, despite having sent you away. He wishes Mr. Borson to meet justice, after all; it will be easy enough to ask him to do this. But while seeing that the maids are sought is your most indispensable goal at the moment, it is not your only motive. And the other reasons you wish to see him again are harder to say. How could you phrase the fact that he cannot tell you if he has changed his mind or if he spoke rashly unless you return to the basement, and so it seems only fair to return to it? How can you express that knowing he is pacing in the twilight, solitary, lonely, has been distressing you ever since you woke up? 

Perhaps you need not convey either of those things. But you must find a way to say that he is a help to you, not a danger; and you must find a way to say that you do not believe he is evil.It is evil to take lives, but doing evil while mad or delirious, so delirious that one cannot remember the second half of the crime, so mad that one used a monogrammed knife for a stabbing, is a matter for mourning and mercy, not a manifestation of turpitude. 

You look through the dim room at the crucifix. He must have chosen to have it there; the house has few sacred objects in it. Did this man who now thinks himself irredeemably damned choose it as a symbol of a belief in grace, that he has now forgotten?

It is growing late. Words prepared or unprepared, you will go down. 

You are scarcely halfway down the stairs, shivering--the basement is colder than ever tonight--when Loki exclaims your name. Only his face is visible in the twilight beyond the bars, pale and relieved. He steps closer to the barrier as you reach the foot of the stairs. “You screamed, last night? Or was that my sister’s ghost…?

“I had a nightmare. About Miss Borson’s ghost. She reenacted her death--on my bed.” 

“An unpleasant habit of hers,” Loki says wryly. He looks as if he has not slept, you see as your eyes adjust, his dark hair falling into his eyes and his face as pale as Helena’s. 

You walk closer to the bars, close enough that you could touch. “Did you have the same dream?”

Loki shakes his head. “I was awake. I was hoping she would not trouble you, since you are not her father’s child. Even by adoption.”

“She wishes me to leave,” you say, and decide not to add, “because she thinks her father will kill me.” “I’m sorry--it didn’t occur to me that you’d heard me scream.”

A wry smile twists his mouth. “Why would it? But if you are not here for that reason, why have you come?”

“Because I mean to write a letter exposing Mr. Borson’s crimes, but I cannot write left-handed,” you say. You take a deep breath, trying to pick words to express that that is not the only reason you wished to speak with him, but he is already walking to his table. 

He pulls a sheet of paper and a pen from its drawer. “Dictate at will; I’m rather good at transcription.”

You wrap your shawl more tightly around you, and describe Mr. Borson’s hint that he killed Helena, and the room with all of the maids’ belongings, and then you continue, “Moreover, his son, Locke Borson, whom--”

Loki looks up at you so suddenly that you stop dictating. “I hadn’t realized your passion for justice stretched so far as attempting to restore the inheritances of madmen.” 

“Why would it not?” you ask simply. He looks at the paper again, and you dictate on. “--whom he claims is dead and whose estate he has inherited, is alive; I have spoken with him, and he is penning this letter for me since Mr. Borson maimed my wrist….”

And then the letter is done, and Loki hands it to you. Despite the darkness, it is written neatly, so neatly that the thought flits across your mind that he could write with his eyes closed. “Thank you,” you say. “I’ll sign it in my room. And then to send it--is there any way to send it without Mr. Borson opening it?”

Loki hesitates, looking down. “If you know anyone whom you could trust to send it onwards to the law, who would seem innocuous….”

Well-thought. “The vicar of my village?”

“No. Too typical a person to consult in distress.”

“Ah...my governess when I was a child, Miss Cox?”

“Excellent. Of course, he  _ may _ open it, but if he is busy, and not over-suspicious of you….”

You nod. “I must try.”

Loki returns to his desk and you dictate a note to Miss Cox, asking her to forward the longer letter to a justice, and her address.

“Thank you,” you say when Loki hands you the note. “I could not have written these for days without your help.” 

A faint smile flickers across his face. “I scarcely deserve thanks for aiding your efforts to bring down Odom Borson. Speaking of your inability to write, is your wrist mending at all?”

You hold it out, letting him see. “It looks and feels as it did, but it doesn’t hurt much, as long as I don’t use it.” 

His hand moves slightly, as if he meant to take your wrist in it again but changed his mind, and you look at each other, suddenly silent. He told you to go, and you returned, and now the question is if you will return again.

You decide to ask. “May I speak with you tomorrow? To tell--to tell you if Mr. Borson conveyed the letter?” You were not expecting your voice to shake. 

Loki’s eyes brighten. “To tell me anything you please. I spoke rashly, yesterday; any ally is better than none.”

You smile up at him, holding out your left hand. “Then I shall often seek your company.” You blush; that is not something a lady should tell a gentleman. But gentlemen are rarely so completely unable to seek a lady.

Loki takes your hand in his, and lifts it to his cold lips. “You do me too much honor.” His voice is soft, and so are his eyes. You find yourself wanting to caress his pale cheek and make him smile.

But this is only the fourth time you have spoken with him, and the front door is opening above as Odom Borson comes home, and so you simply give Loki’s hand a light pressure and hurry up the stairs to sign and seal your letter.

“Aunt Freda,” you say that evening, when Mr. Borson is not in the room, “how might I send a letter? I’ve written to my governess.”

“Mr. Borson will take the correspondence--” She pauses, her smile fading, and then it returns. “He thinks young people should not write letters,” she says. “But I will enclose it in one of mine which I am about to send, and add a postscript asking Mrs. Abernethy to forward it to your governess.”

Mr. Borson carries his exposure, doubly wrapped in other letters, out through his house’s doors in the morning. 


	11. Chapter XI

“You seem tired,” Loki says quietly. 

“I dreamt about Helena again last night,” you explain, shifting how you are sitting. The floor of the basement is growing colder as midwinter comes, but you and Loki have fallen into the habit of sitting on it during your almost daily conversations, close enough to whisper. “She told me that it was now too late to leave.”

“A helpful notification,” he says dryly, twisting a thread that is fraying from his coat sleeve. “You’ve never told me--is your envisioning of her based on a portrait?”

“No” You shake your head. “I’ve never seen one. I only know she was a great beauty, according to your mother. Why?” You suspect that your sleeping mind has simply envisioned Helena looking like Loki’s older sister, ignoring his adoption. 

“Idle curiosity,” Loki says. He rests his shoulder against one of the bars. “I often have vivid dreams, as you know--last night I dreamed of you--”

“Loki.” You look up at him, silently asking him to tell you why he wished to know if you have seen Helena’s portrait, though you doubt you want to know. He has seen her ghost, after all; and you sense that he thinks your dreams are crafted by her, not by your mind. 

Dim in the darkening room, Loki presses his lips together for a moment. “I  _ have _ seen her portrait...as well as her spirit...., and your description of her is immensely accurate. You must take her warning seriously.”

“Of what use will that be? I can’t leave--all I can do is fret more than I already fret,” you say quietly. Your voice quivers; before you dreamed of Helena, you dreamed of a pillow slammed over your face, a man’s angry weight behind it, and Odom Borson’s voice sternly directing you to hold still. But you will not tell Loki you dreamed that. You curl your legs under you more tightly, folding your hands on your lap. “I lock my door, and put a chair before it.” Your hands are trembling, you realize. 

Loki reaches through the bars and takes one of your hands in his. He must have guessed you were distressed; it is too dark for him to have seen your hands quiver. “Ask my mother to help you find a new place to reside. Invent an excuse; she will guess that you have a better cause, and will send you elsewhere.”

Yes, Aunt Freda would help you leave; you have seen more and more that she is always perceptive, always clever at protecting you from her husband while outwardly considering her husband an esteemable man. But surely the letter will reach the law within a few days, if it has not already--and it would be a pity to be leaving for a stranger’s house at the same time Odin Borson was leaving his home for prison. You do not want to leave Aunt Freda, and you do not want to leave Loki--not incarcerated alone, and, you are admitting to yourself, not at all. 

“I’ll wait a few days,” you say. “Since once the law receives my letter, Mr. Borson will--”

“--Deduce who sent it, and be most eager for your demise!” Loki interposes. He takes a deep breath and speaks quietly again. “You are worthy of a better fate than haunting this accursed house.”

_ And you are worthy of a better fate than languishing in its dungeon _ . “I’ll only wait a few days,” you say, voice quiet. It is too dark now to see his expression.

You feel a light, cold touch on your other hand, and let go of the fold of your shawl you were twisting so he can take that hand too. His hands are almost as cold as the air, so thin that their fine bones are hard against your palms, but exceedingly gentle. “Odom Borson could kill you in a few minutes,” he says, almost too quietly to hear. “Please, leave.”

You know it is wise advice; you know you are in danger; you know…. “I will ask Aunt Freda for help very soon,” you give in, and--conventionless in the darkness and in the fear that you will never return here again--lift his hand and softly kiss it.

Loki whispers your name, his hand slipping from yours and rising to caress your cheek. And then he lets go of you entirely and you hear him rise and walk away from you, into the dark back of his cell. 

You stand and leave, silent tears in your eyes. Carefully, you ascend the dark stairs--your candle burned out--and close the door in the tapestry behind you.

Aunt Freda is sitting on your bed, ankles crossed, stitching sprigs of rosemary onto a handkerchief. She smiles at you. “There you are, my dear.”

Your eyes widen. She knows you visit Loki? Whom she told you was dead? 

The corners of Aunt Freda’s mouth quirk up. “I mailed a letter for you, the address of which was visible,” she reminds you, and pats the bed beside her. You sit down, no longer flummoxed but still startled; you should have realized she would recognize Loki’s penmanship.

She takes two green stitches, depicting a rosemary needle. “I believe I told you Thornton is coming home for Christmas?”

“Yes, Aunt Freda.”

“I’ve decided to deck the house in greenery tomorrow morning, and it seemed to me that you might enjoy helping gather and arrange it. And our creche, too.” 

“That will be delightful,” you say. It would, in a different house. You wipe a tear from your cheek and smile at her. This will give you a chance to ask to leave, as you told Loki you would.


	12. Chapter XII

Aunt Freda, a large basket hanging from her arm, leads the way through the foggy morning towards a small grove of green cypresses. She hands you a pair of gardening shears. “We’ll make a garland for the mantel in the parlor, and hang a wreath above it. And when Thornton comes, he’ll bring in a tree.”

You begin clipping small branches, gathering three or four in your other hand and then tossing them into the basket, which Aunt Freda has set down on the snow-dusted grass. 

“You must be wondering why I told you Locke is dead,” Aunt Freda says softly, reaching up to clip a branch that is a few inches above her amber bun. 

“Did you think I might tell Mr. Borson that you visit him?” you ask, also quietly, tossing a few branches into the basket. One of them snags on your glove and you wiggle it out of the yarn strand it is clinging to. 

“Before I knew you, I thought you might. But chiefly--it seemed responsible, as your aunt, to prevent you from becoming involved in our family secrets.”

“To keep me from associating with the skeletons,” you say wryly.

Aunt Freda looks away, clipping another branch and then another. “You’ve been speaking with Locke very often.”

“Almost every day,” you state, unapologetically. “He is alone, and he--does not deserve to be.” You cut another branch, so forcefully that it dives into the snow. You bend and pick it up, and toss it into the basket. “He was mad, Aunt Freda, and so he is not guilty; and now he is not mad. Why must he be imprisoned? And reputed dead?” She must know, and you want her to admit it--though when she looks at you with wide, sad eyes, you wish you had not tried to make her articulate her husband’s criminality. 

“It is Mr. Borson’s wish,” she says, halting with a cypress stem between her fingers. “And he is the head of this household. He wishes to preserve Locke from public disrepute.” She presses his lips tightly together and looks up into the cypress, clipping the branch. “I am glad you have been visiting my son,” she says softly, dropping the cypress into the basket and reaching up to cut another branch, and you decide not to ask her now to help you leave. No, you’ll help her decorate, help her prepare, and  _ then _ , before Mr. Borson comes home tonight, ask her for help leaving. She has been kind to you; you feel as if you owe her help with her attempt to brighten her home’s darkness with a basket of cypress. 

The basket is heavy enough, once cypress is mounded up to the edge of it, that both of you need to carry it in. You set it down heavily in front of the parlor fireplace, its dark mantel so heavily carved that you cannot tell what the people embossed on it are doing and feel as if perhaps you do not want to know. The paper on the walls changes from the color of dried blood to the color of fresh blood as Aunt Freda opens the black velvet drapes. “I think we shall light many candles,” she says with a determined smile, looking out into the fog outside. “I’ll fetch more, and the creche. Have you made a garland before? I set twine on the table.” 

You reply that you have, and sit on the floor to begin crafting one as her heels tap away. Cypress over cypress, bound with twine, a garland that looks out of place on the dark floor in the grey light. You shiver, wishing a fire were in the fireplace. 

Heels tap behind you, sounding harder than Aunt Freda’s. She must have changed her shoes. You hold up the garland. “It’s halfway done,” you say with a smile. 

A frigid hand, colder than Loki’s, colder than snow, touches your shoulder. “Leave now, you fool,” Helena’s deep voice whispers.

You drop the garland onto your lap, stiffening, freezing, your heart jolting. She is here, not a voice, not a dream, entirely dead and entirely present. 

Her fingers slide up onto your neck and forward, their tips touching your windpipe.

With a scream, you fling yourself forward away from her, stumbling over your garland, and clutch the edge of the red couch to pull yourself to your feet. You turn as soon as you are standing, shaking from head to foot.

Aunt Freda is almost running towards you, candles pointing out of a bag that hangs from her arm, and a box held in her hands. “My dear? Are you hurt?”

“No,” you mouth. You clear your throat. “No. Helena. Miss Borson. Sh-she--she was touching me.” 

Unsurprised sympathy fills Aunt Freda’s face as she sets the box down on the nearest wingchair and drops the bag of candles next to it. “She’s never harmed anyone, my dear.”

You take a deep breath, folding your arms tightly. Wanting to leave because the house is haunted is a superlatively plausible excuse. “I must leave, Aunt Freda. Anywhere. I can’t--I dream about her, and….” You dissolve into genuine tears. A murdered woman touched your throat; her murderer intends to kill you, in her opinion and in Loki’s; and you may never see Loki again; and, worst of all, he may die in the dark dungeon under this haunted house. 

The front doors creak open and boom closed. “Freda!” Mr. Borson calls, as sharply as an unkind man might call a dog. He is home earlier than you foresaw. 

Aunt Freda tenses and then smiles, as sweetly as if her husband had called her with love in his tone. Gently, she pats your arm. “We’ll discuss this tomorrow, my dear. Of course, I’ll help you find another home if your nerves cannot bear Helena….” She slips a handkerchief into your hand, embroidered rosemary on it. “I must go speak with Mr. Borson. Would you arrange the creche?” She lightly touches the box she dropped on the chair, gathers her skirts, and vanishes from the parlor. 

You press the handkerchief against your eyes. You are pulling the lid off the box when you hear Mr. Borson bark, “Freda! Do you recognize this?!”

Under quilt batting are the Virgin Mary kneeling, a shepherd boy holding a lamb, a donkey, a baby , a small wooden box of straw…. They are made of china. You set the baby in the small wooden box and put him in the center of the deep windowsill, and put Mary next to him. 

“Perhaps you did not read it, or know what it was. But do not tell me that you did not recognize Locke’s hand, Freda.” Your heart leaps into your throat. The letter must have returned from the dead letter office, and Odom Borson knows--he knows you essayed to tell the law that he is a murderer and thief--

Moving like a clockwork toy, you set Joseph on the other side of the manger. You cannot hear what Aunt Freda is saying.

“How did she access Locke, Freda? She cannot have used my entrance.”

You know you should escape. Odom Borson will kill you if you do not: he knows that you have allied yourself with the rightful owner of his second set of mills, and he knows that you tried to expose that fact that Locke is alive and competent. But Mr. Borson is between you and the doors. You set shepherds behind Joseph, your hands shaking. The window has small panes and strong iron framework. You set a sheep beside the shepherds. There are no doors in the room except the one that leads into the hall, the hall in which you hear heavy footsteps marching toward the parlor door followed by the heels of Aunt Freda. 

You should pray.

You lift another sheep, and drop it. It shatters, china wool flying against the wall, onto your boots, onto the floor. It looks like snow on the dark wood.

“You are an ungrateful, mendacious girl,” Mr. Borson declares behind you. You turn, hands clutching each other. “You have requited my generosity in housing an orphan to whom neither I nor my wife is connected by sullying my reputation, fantasizing about my dismissal of two incompentant servants, and traduce my treatment of the criminally insane foundling of whom I am the guardian!”

Whether you abase yourself or excoriate him, he will murder you. “Your reputation is too dirty to sully, sir; I theorized, not fantasized; and I did not traduce your treatment, I discredited it!” 

“If my wife were not present,” Mr. Borson hisses,“I would ask you how you paid that madman to pen your letter.”

“Odom.” Aunt Freda scratches her palm. ”My niece is not malicious, and she is certainly not...ruined.” She turns to you. “You should apologize to Mr. Borson.”

“I would not accept it,” he says, almost interrupting her. 

Aunt Freda turns back to him, touching his arm.. “Odom. She meant no harm.” 

Mr. Borson looks down at her and affection mixes with the anger in his face. “No, Freda.  _ Obedient  _ wives may ask for such favors as overlooking ingratitude and anarchy. But, as a token of my unshakeable regard for you---” 

He turns back to you and grips your wrist that he sprained a fortnight ago, shoving pain into your forearm. “I shall confine you to your room, indefinitely. My wife and my magnanimity are the only reasons that I shall not cast you out into midwinter.”

As he half-drags you out of the parlor, through the foyer, and up the stairs, you are certain that the only reason is his desire that you definitely, rather than possibly, die. 

Mr. Borson turns the outside lock on your door before pulling you through it, and shuts the door as sharply as a knock once both of you are inside the room. He releases your wrist and strides toward the tapestry, staring at the unicorn as if it is a threat to his economic success. With one wrinkled hand, he rips it off the wall, letting it fold on the floor, and pushes the door. It swings open. Upward he looks, at the places where he drove nails and a mother tore them out, and his lips press tightly together. He pulls the door shut--Loki must wonder why you did not come down, unless he could hear his adoptive father shouting-- and looks at the massive wardrobe. 

With startling strength, he shoves it across the floor, dark wood creeping across dark wood, pale hands pushing against the wardrobe and black overshoes bracing against the floor. The impulse runs through your mind to race down the stairs before the wardrobe obstructs the door, to tell Loki what is happening--but you do not want to make Mr. Borson angry at him as well as you. You back against the wall as the wardrobe creeps in front of the door. 

Mr. Borson does not stop pushing the wardrobe until the door to the basement is invisible. Then he strides to the door into the hallway, unlocks it, leaves, and locks it behind him. You walk to the window, no pane of which is large enough to escape through, and look out into the fog. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit to https://www.ywt.org.uk/wildlife-explorer/trees-and-shrubs/lawson-cypress for the information that cypress grows in Yorkshire.


	13. Chapter XIII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Non-graphic vomiting.

Morning, raining as if the sky intended to ensure that the entirety of Yorkshire will become frozen when winter weather returns. You have forced yourself not to sleep, imagining waking with a pillow crushed against your nose and mouth. Hunger twisting your stomach, you curl up in a chair, waiting, waiting, waiting. You have tried to move the wardrobe, but cannot budge it. You have tried to pick the door’s lock with a hairpin, but have failed. You’ve drunk water from your pitcher, and have refilled it by pulling up one of the small panels at the bottom of the window and, through it, holding the pitcher out in the rain. Surely Aunt Freda will ensure that you are fed.

Creaking floor--Odom Borson’s steps. You spring from your chair. He unlocks the door and opens it, six or seven inches. His hand protrudes through the space and sets a bowl of oatmeal on the floor, and then he quietly closes the door and locks it, and his steps walk away. 

You pick the warm bowl up. It has a spoon in it, and no milk. Loki told you once that this is what Odom brings him, once a day, with water; Aunt Freda brought him fruit and bread and cheese, but now her door to him is doubly barred from her. Will Loki think both she and you chose to cease visiting him? 

You blink away tears and eat a spoonful of the oatmeal. It is bland, but better than nothing. Does Mr. Borson make it himself? Or does the cook make a bowl (or two) of oatmeal every day, not knowing why? Ruefully, you smile as you imagine Odom Borson, suited and frowning, stirring a pot of oatmeal, adding salt---oh. Adding. He wants you dead. He has immured you with only oatmeal to eat. It seems quite likely that you have just eaten a spoonful of poisoned grain. 

You place the bowl of oatmeal on your washstand and curl up in your chair again, your heart racing. If you are unharmed when noon comes, you will finish eating it. If you are not….

If he has poisoned you, will you haunt this house as Hela apprehends? You look up at the crucifix on the wall, at the nails stabbed through his hands and feet, at the crown of thorns. Perhaps Hela did not believe in his death...or, more likely, did not believe in his resurrection….

_ Help me to believe that I believe _ . 

Nausea rises in your throat. You curl into a smaller ball and attempt to breathe calmly, counting every nail in the dark wooden floor that divides you from Loki. If you die of poison or of smothering, will he ever be free?

But that is not a good topic for thought, since you are attempting to calm yourself. Likely, you have not been poisoned, and you certainly have not been smothered. You are borrowing trouble--

Nausea rises in your throat like smoke in a chimney. 

Once it concludes, you are whiter than the snow the rain has metamorphosed into and weeping as if your heart were broken, but you are no longer nauseous, and no longer either worrying that the oatmeal was poisoned or worrying that it will kill you. It was poisoned. It did not kill you. These questions are no longer in the air. They have been roughly jerked down out of it.

The remaining questions are these: when will Mr. Borson come to discover your dead body and learn that you are not dead, and, then, how will he essay to kill you?

After a sleepless night and violent illness, you know you cannot stay awake, so you make a pillar of small objects (vases, books, an inkwell) in front of the door, to tumble down with thuds and shatters if Mr. Borson opens it while you are slumbering. He can kill you whether you are awake or asleep, but if you are awake at least you can scream, and perchance Aunt Freda will realize that you did not die of a weak heart, and neither did Helena, and that the maids are dead.

You do not want to die. You want to be safe, and Aunt Freda to be free of pretense, and Loki to be free from his cell, and the maids and Helena to have justice. With a sigh, you curl up on your bed and fall into a tense sleep. 

Thud! Smash! You spring off the bed, hands clenched. Glass breaks, glass rolls across wood, metal and bookcovers slam and thud on the floor. 

Mr. Borson looks down at the clutter and gives it a reluctant smile as he locks the door behind him. 

“I see you are in a state of hysteria,” he says dryly, striding directly towards the full bowl of oatmeal. “Building barricades and--” he picks it up-- “refusing sustenance are not the acts of a rational individual. You must consume nourishment. After all—the law might hold me culpable for permitting a member of my household to starve herself.” He gives you a thin smile. “If you have not eaten this when I return tonight, I shall be forced to compel you to eat it.”

Repulsion and desperation make you straightforward. “We both know that you are attempting to kill me, Mr. Borson,” you hear yourself say. “Why are you speaking as if I were unconscious of this?”

“I am pretending nothing,” he answers, as cold as window panes in winter. He sets the oatmeal on your washstand, exits your room, and locks the door. 

Trembling with disgusted anxiety and with hunger, you sit on the bed and let your head rest on your knees. It is odd that Aunt Freda has not come to ask after you. She could come to your door and talk to you through the keyhole, even if she does not have the keys. Or is Mr. Borson keeping the upstairs locked? Or  _ her _ incarcerated too? Is she safe?

You stand up, and pace back and forth across the room. 

The snowflakes outside dwindle in size and multiply in quantity. They accumulate, heaping onto and adhering to the cypresses. The snow is at least eight inches deep when twilight falls. Mr. Borson will return soon. Will he force-feed you the poison? If the most you can do to defend yourself is obliging him to cook oatmeal again, then you will oblige him to cook oatmeal again. Or to think of another entree to poison. You take the bowl to the window and drop it and the deleterious grain it contains into the snow. 

As you close the window panel, the front doors creak open and a merry man whose voice you have never heard before calls out, “Father! Mother! We are here!” That must be Thornton Borson. But whom has he brought home for Christmas? You put your ear against your door. 

“Thornton!” Odom Borson exclaims, sounding kinder than you have ever heard him sound. “And who is your...fellow traveller?” 

“Father, this is Father Steven Rogers, my friend. He has been assigned to a parish in New York, and needs a lodging between there and the Continent. Steven, this is my father, Mr. Odom Borson--and my mother! Mrs. Freda Borson!” 

He has brought a priest here? Would--perhaps, would this priest help you? 

You cannot understand what Father Rogers or Aunt Freda is saying; they both speak quietly. “We’ll prepare for dinner!” Thornton says, and you hear loud steps coming up the stairs. “Come on, Father Steven! You can have the room beside mine.” 

The room between Thornton’s and yours! Someone with lighter steps than Thornton walks up the stairs. The door of the room beside yours creaks as Thornton opens it, and then you hear him opening the door of his own room. Father Rogers walks into the room beside yours and begins coughing, so long that you go from thinking that he breathed in dust, to thinking that he has a cold, to thinking that he may have consumption. Finally, he stops coughing, and opens his window. If you knock on the wall and speak to him, he will be able to hear you. Shaking a little, you stare at the wall. Should you wait until after dinner? No. At dinner Mr. Borson might direct Father Rogers to sleep in a different room. 

You knock on the wall, aiming to knock loudly enough that the priest will hear you and quietly enough that nobody else in the house will. “Father Rogers? Father Rogers?”

“Who’s there?” He has a kind, quiet, American voice. 

“Mrs. Borson’s step-niece. Please help me! I am--I am in danger. I am locked in my room.” You press your lips together, desperately wanting to tell him that Mr. Borson is trying to murder you but afraid he will think you are insane. “I haven’t eaten in almost two days,” you say instead. “ _ Please _ help me escape.” 

“May the saints preserve us.” He keeps his voice down. “May I ask Thornton to help us, ma’am?” 

You blink away tears. “His father is my captor.” 

“Who are you speaking with, Steve?” Thornton asks, loudly, curiously.

Father Rogers hushes him. “There’s a lady locked in the next room. She needs our help.”

“What?” Thornton blurts. He knocks on the wall. “Who are you?”

“Your mother’s step-niece. Please help--” Your voice breaks. 

“We’ll help you escape tonight,” Father Rogers vows. “By God’s grace.”

“Tonight?” Thornton sounds bemused. Five or six loud footsteps, and then he is trying to turn your locked doorknob. 

“Thornton, your father--” A thud drowns out the rest of Father Roger’s sentence, and your door flies open. 

Thornton Borson beams at you, fair-haired and tall enough that the doorway makes him duck, his immensely muscular arms folded. 

“Thornton?” Mr. Borson shouts from downstairs. “What was that sound?”

Panic rips through you. 

“We were boxing, Father!” Thornton shouts back. 

A small, frail man appears behind Thornton. He is wearing a cassock and looks like you imagine Sir Galahad, if Sir Galahad were in extremely ill health. 

“ _ Boxing _ ?” Mr. Borson vociferates. Your stomach clenches. If Odom Borson ascends the stairs--

“Please, there’s something in the basement you must see. I can’t explain, but you must,” you plead of Thornton and Father Rogers. You hurry towards the wardrobe, pointing at it. “There’s a door, behind here, please--” You are determined to ensure that two more people know Loki is alive. 

Thornton shoves the wardrobe sideways, as easily as you would push a wingchair, shallow dents in the floor following its legs like the wakes of four boats. As soon as he has moved it far enough that you can pass through the door, you do, and run down the stairs, almost falling once because you are so unsteady from your fast and your fear. 

Loki is sitting on the floor of his twilit cell, listless, but a moment after you see him he looks up and springs to his feet, saying your name. Through the bars he holds out his arms to you and you reach through the cage to cling to him, tears running down your face. His arms close around you, and he bends his head and asks you quietly, “Has he harmed you?”

You know of whom he is speaking. “He tried to poison me.” Your voice is quavery and quiet; only Loki hears it. He holds you closer, so close that the bars would bruise you both if he held you tighter. 

  
  
“ _ Locke _ !” Thornton cries. “You’re alive! You’re in a cage!”

“Thank you for informing me, brother,” Loki says dryly. One of his hands rises to stroke your hair. “Your father lusted after my inheritance, and so he refuses to admit that I am no longer mad.” 

“I’ll tell him you’ve regained your senses!” Thornton avers, sanguinely. 

“Thornton. He may not care about--” starts Father Rogers, and then, from your room, Mr. Borson shouts Thornton’s name and your name.

“Thornton,” Loki implores. “Help her leave this house.”

“Leave?” You turn your head and look at Thornton through your tears. He looks righteously furious but superlatively bewildered. 

And then Mr. Borson is striding down the stairs and past Father Rogers, who steps in his way and whom he shoves aside by brute strength, and past Thornton, his eyes fixed on you. “Get away from that madman,” he orders, and raises his hand to grab your arm and then--he is covered in stars, stars that are spangling the basement. 

You faint in Loki’s arms. 


	14. Chapter XIV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am back at college, so my brain is tired and I am busy. But I will continue writing this!

“—not a raving maniac! And he’s not dead. You lied to me, Father!”

Under you, the stone floor is as cold as snow; nearby and upwards, Thornton shouts, his voice loud with indignation. A hand is on your shoulder. Your eyes flutter open.

Loki in kneeling against his bars, reaching out to touch your shoulder. His alarm metamorphoses into relief as you look up at him. “You fainted,” he says softly. 

“I decided the knowledge that your depraved brother lived would distract you from your studies.” Loki looks away from you, at his adoptive father. Mr. Borson’s hands are at his sides, age-spotted fists under his black coat cuffs, and he looks at Thornton as if the latter were a child of two years throwing himself backwards onto a hardwood floor in a tantrum. “Although, judging by your abysmal marks, you could not possibly have been more distracted than you were!”

“I failed no courses!” Thornton retorts.

“Shall I help you sit?” You were so absorbed by Odom Borson’s cruelty that you did not notice Loki’s attention had returned to you. Where did Father Rogers go? 

“Yes, please,” you answer. 

Loki’s jaw is clenched; his attention is plainly irefully fixed on Mr. Borson’s reply to Thornton--“This conversation is ended. You may visit Locke if you wish--” even though his eyes are on you and he is taking your hand in his. He helps you sit up quite gently, and then rises and walks further back into his cell as Mr. Borson’s voice echoes off the dark stone walls-- “only because otherwise you may still harbor the delusion--” he takes a step closer to Thornton, raising an emphatic finger-- “that he is more than an ungrateful, debased madman!”

A mug of water appears in front of you; you start and then take it, and look up at Loki. “Thank you,” you whisper.  _ You’re not wicked, you’re not even mad, now….  _

As you say it he is striding away from you, towards Thornton and Odom Borson, and speaking very clearly. “Or, perhaps, only because you have no practicable way to prevent his visiting me.” They both turn and look at him as if his interposing in their discussion of his fate were a bizarre turn of events. “How would you stop him, Odom Borson? Locks? Your pride in him nipped at his heels, impelled him to increase his strength until he could kick down any rotting door in this blood-stained--” 

“Enough, Locke!” Mr. Borson interrupts.

Loki clenches his hand around one of the bars and speaks more loudly, more clearly. “Disowning? Or---a pillow, perhaps, or a bottle of arsenic? You’ve thinned your own heirs until--”

“ENOUGH!” Mr. Borson shouts, and Loki laughs, the shout’s and the laughter’s echoes disharmonizing. You shudder. Though you doubt Mr. Borson would have freed Loki even if the latter had been perfectly silent, what will he do to him now? Furious and knowing Thornton is unlikely to keep Loki’s living state secret, will he not kill Loki as soon as Thornton returns to the continent, or sooner?

You take a gulp of water (the vague idea in your mind that taking it will prevent you from fainting again), reach up and grip a cold bar, and rise shakily to your feet. The floor feels as untrustworthy as a gallow’s trapdoor. 

“Thinned his heirs?” Thornton cuts in, looking at Loki with uneasy confusion. “Pillow?”

“Oh, dear.” Loki’s eyes are too bright, the eyes of a man coming down with an infection’s high fever, the eyes of a man about to make a hopeless last stand. “Do you still think all your ‘dreams’ of that beautiful, smothered lady were dreams, brother? Do you still pretend we never heard her laugh in the day?”

A shadow crosses Thornton’s face, and he reaches through the bars and puts his hand on Loki’s shoulder. “Locke. Perhaps you are not well….”

Loki stares at him, eyes wide and sad. “No.”

“He’s not mad, Mr. Thornton,” you say. Your voice is too quiet. You clear your throat, blinking because stars are re-spangling the room. “He is  _ not _ .”

“No, he is not,” says a more confident voice, and there is Aunt Freda, lifting her black skirt as she speeds down the stairs, Father Rogers coughing painfully in her wake—into his elbow, and holding a large loaf of bread in his other hand almost like a boy would hold a toy sword. “You know he is not, Odom.”

Mr. Borson’s brow furrows as his eye fixes on his wife. “Do I, Freda? Or is his regained sanity merely a...delusion of yours?” 

She looks up at him with steely resolve and then leans close to him and murmurs something, several sentences, too quietly for anyone except himself to hear. You are distracted from lip-reading by Father Rogers clearing his throat beside you. “This is safe,” he says under his breath, and gives you the loaf of bread. 

“Thank—“ you begin, and then both you and Father Rogers start and look at Mr. Borson as he steps back from Aunt Freda so quickly that he almost pushes her. 

“You could lose everything I’ve given you,” he says. They stare at each other levelly, two pale, secret-using faces in the twilight. Father Rogers stifles a cough. Loki is still standing where he stood while inveighing against Mr. Borson, but he is silent now; both he and Thornton are silent, watching their parents. Odom Borson blinks. “Very well. You may give him the liberty of the house, on probation--I have no doubt that he will soon prove himself unfit to have it.” He pulls his golden watch out of his pocket and flicks it open. “This fracas has made me late. Delay dinner until ten, by which I shall return.” Before ascending the stairs, he tosses a key at Thornton. 

Thornton looks down at it and beams. “The door in his study!” He runs up the stairs at a speed that makes you suspect he is an athlete. 

Loki glances at you and then hurries toward you, and you wonder if you are looking more ill than you were, an instant before your hands start shaking so badly that you drop the bread and almost lose your hold of the bar. He catches you, hands as cold as the bars through which he is reaching; though you are too faint to think clearly, you still marvel that he is thinking of your health rather than waiting by the door to freedom. “Mother--take her upstairs, and ensure that she eats, please.” 

  
  


And then Aunt Freda is leading you toward the stairs. “I’ll fetch you soup, once you’re sitting down,” she says gently. 

You shake your head and nearly trip on Aunt Freda’s skirt, or perhaps your skirt. “I--I want to see him go free.”

Aunt Freda laughs very softly. “You cannot see him if you are in a swoon, my dear. I’m sure he will come to you.” She looks back at Loki before helping you ascend the stairs to your room.


	15. Chapter XV

Aunt Freda left you, fed and much steadier, some ten minutes ago, saying that she must tell the cook to augment dinner--since you and Loki will be unexpectedly present, you surmise.

You sit on your bed in the candlelight, chin resting on your folded-up knees, and stare at your dark door, hoping and almost expecting that Loki will knock on it. You want to see him walking about the house, through sunlight, through candlelight, free and safe...not that this house will be safe once Thornton returns to his college. Odom must kill Loki, to keep his father’s estate, and he must kill you so you do not reveal his murderous theft.

Too tired to plan escaping from this house, too tired to do anything except anticipate footsteps approaching your door, you bury your face against your knees. You do not know what his steps sound like, on any floor save the stone one of his cage.

And now he is free. He’s free. You smile exhaustedly, rejoiced for him. He is free, and surely he can escape. Even if he leaves you here, alone and in danger, you will be glad he did not languish in darkness, in the deeps, unremittingly….

Your candle blows out.

She laughs.

“Alone in the dark, waiting for a murderous madman to lead you down the stairs,” she whispers in the darkness behind you, as close as if she were sitting on the bed. “Do you think he loves you?”

Footsteps, far away. Loki might walk like that, out of his cell, walking down the corridors, glad to see you...or wishing he need not bother, because he does not need you now that he is no longer trapped….

Helena laughs again, and the realization flies through you that somehow, somehow she is making you expect Loki to act cruelly to you, despite his having been kind to you from when you dropped your shawl to his feet to last hour ago when he kept you from falling. 

Helena’s eyes stab into your back. If you looked behind you, would they be alive, blinking, looking, or would they be dead eyes in a smothered face? 

You spring to your feet, and stop short, dizzily standing still with your hand on the bed. If Helena were not there, you would think you were scarcely ready to stand, but with her eyes on you, with her laugh behind you, dizziness and darkness cannot stop you from walking. Waveringly, you hurry towards where you know the door is, holding up your skirt so that--however much furniture you trip over--at least you will not trip on that. You reach out and touch the door, wooden carved panels, and feel for the latch.

Footsteps that you have only ever heard before on stone stride down the corridor towards your door. You push it open; the faint candlelight of the corridor blazes in your eyes as you all but slam it closed after you.

“How emphatic,” Loki says dryly, behind you. You turn with a silent gasp--somehow, his steps had sounded as if he were coming from the left, not from the right--and see him offering you his arm and an uncertain smile. “I am glad to see you revived--will you come down with me?” 

It is odd but wonderful to see him surrounded by so much space, to see him before an open, portrait-adorned wall instead of stone, to see him with nothing separating you. You take his arm, hoping Helena sees that you refuse to believe her insinuations. “I’m so very glad you’re free.”

“By your sacrifices,” he responds, far more gratitude than gladness in his eyes. “For which I thank you.”

What can you say? “You’re welcome,” would be banal; a speech about justice would be pompous; a declaration of love would be... You fall silent, walking beside him toward the stairs. Your legs are still weak; they seem to think that whenever your weight is on one of them, that leg must involuntarily vibrate. 

At the top of the stairs you halt and stretch out your free hand to cling to the railing. You look down the dozens of dark angles anxiously; they look too smooth, too steep, too many, with your legs wavering as they are.

Loki clears his throat. “I could carry you, if you’ll permit me.” 

Blood rises to your face. “Thank you,” you say, very softly.

As inhesitantly and easily as if he had been carrying you every evening for months, Loki lifts you into his arms and begins descending the stairs, step by step. You hold very still, eyes downcast. Any gentleman might carry a faint lady down the stairs; it’s not a demonstration of affection--but in love with Loki as you are, it is impossible to be in his arms, resting against his chest, without feeling as if he were embracing you. 

The dark angles of the steps vanish one by one behind you, and, scarcely audibly, Loki sighs. At last you look up at him, and see his lips parted and his eyes fixed on you as if you were sunlight or hope or home, and were unattainable.

His gaze flickers away from yours, and he pretends he is focused merely on the last few steps, but his heart is thudding against you. He loves you, and he does not intend to tell you. 

You feel dizzier than when you looked down the stairs as he sets you carefully on your feet at the base of them. “Loki,” you whisper, touching his hand instead of taking his arm as he offers it to you. He waits for you to say more, one brow raised. You swallow hard. If you do not say it, he will not, and his eyes a moment ago told you that he longs for you. Oh, not a moment ago--they are saying it as clearly now. You slip your trembling hand into his. “I love you.” 

Loki draws in his breath, his eyes searching your face as if you had said he were a god, or that winter would never come again. He lifts your hand to his lips and kisses it. “Then my devotion is yours,” he murmurs, a knight pledging himself to a queen, not a man accepting and returning the love of a woman. Indeed, for a moment you are uncertain if it is a gentle refusal of your love, or an odd requital of it--but he comprehends that you are disconcerted, and adds with a soft flicker of a smile, “ _ I  _ am yours.” 

There will be plenty of time--if you escape Odom Borson--to persuade Loki that he deserves your love. But there is not much time at this moment, with everyone else waiting, so you simply twine your arms around him and nestle your cheek against his cravat, whispering again, “I love you.” 

  
  



	16. Chapter XVI

Loki holds you for hardly a breath, just long enough for him to whisper, “We must go, before they seek us.” He brushes his lips against your cheek and steps back, an instant before Thornton steps out of the dining room into the hall. 

Thornton sees you and Loki and beams, so sunnily that you doubt he fully understands he is smiling at a man just released from months of confinement and a woman whose limbs are still trembling from poisoning. “There you are, brother! And Miss--” He frowns, apologetically.

You say your surname as you take Loki’s offered arm and walk towards the dining room. “I had some difficulty with the stairs,” you demurely explain, and fall silent, torn between incredulous delight at what you and Loki have pledged to each other and fear that you must sit at a table with Odom Borson within a few moments.

“--gravy not of sufficiently good quality for an American priest?” Mr. Borson is sneering, as you enter the room.

Father Rogers resolutely passes the sauceboat to the empty place on his left. “It’s Friday, Mr. Borson.” He fills his mouth with gravyless mashed potato. 

Mr. Borson looks up at Thornton as he walks in. “I should thank you for bringing me this catechist to remind me of the details of the faith I abandoned  _ three decades ago _ .” His tone is cold enough to freeze the inappropriate gravy. As Loki seats you between Father Rogers and himself, Mr. Borson’s eyes goes to you. “I am glad you have recovered from your hysterical fit.”

“Thank you,” you say mechanically. 

As Loki eats, his brows, his mouth, his shoulders, the backs of his hands, all are tense. Even the candlelight cannot soften them. He looks at his plate and once in a long while at Thornton or at their mother.

Your plate is full of food you are afraid to eat; Mr. Borson is ignoring you and lecturing Thornton on diligence and on avoiding dissipated companions—the latter possibly advice that a man who has become a dear friend of a priest does not need—and pretending that nobody else but Aunt Freda is present at the table, but that does not mean your food is poisonless. It would be an unwise time to poison you, but….The candlelit shadows of the potatoes and of the meat are as black as the darkness outside the burgundy drapes. 

“They’re safe,” Loki whispers, without looking at you. “Thornton has eaten from each dish since he served you.” You both know Mr. Borson would not let Thornton ingest poison. 

The minutes drag past, full of Odom and Thornton Borson’s disputing voices. Father Rogers has a coughing fit. Aunt Freda smiles, dark shadows under her eyes. She looks as if she has a migraine.

Loki looks at Thornton again, and clears his throat. “Would you care for a game of chess after dinner, brother?” His tone is perfectly natural; if he looked just slightly less tense, you would suppose he really did want to play his brother a chess match.

Thornton blinks. “Of course!” He stands up so quickly that he thuds against the edge of the table, making it tremble. Perhaps he is tired of his father lecturing him. “May we be excused, Father? Mother?”

After they leave, Father Rogers passionately lectures on the parish towards which he is traveling, which seems to be, or to be part of--you are unsure which--a part of New York called Brooklyn. He keeps pausing, as if he thinks he is being loquacious and annoying, and you and Aunt Freda keep asking him questions--both from genuine interest, and from a desire to fill the dark air with something good and pleasant. 

You only stop asking questions when--everyone in the parlor now, except the brothers who are still playing their chess game in an unknown location--Father Rogers has another, worse coughing fit that makes you fear his fragile body will collapse. “No, don’t apologize, Ma’am--Miss,” he assures you pleasantly. “I was due for one.” 

Thornton tramps into the room. “Father! I’ve decided to ride into town. I’ll be back in the morning.” He gives his mother a fond kiss on the cheek and tramps out again, too quickly for Mr, Borson to say more than “But Thornton, you have only--” and too loudly to even hear his name. Mr. Borson sighs, and dog-ears his newspaper at a ninety degree angle.

Wind wuthers outside, strong and cold enough to chill even a strong young athlete like Thornton to the marrow. It sounds like a pack of wolves celebrating their dinner’s announcement of its own coming. You push yourself more closely against the side and back of the settee and skim a society paper, wondering where Loki is. If he is avoiding this room to avoid Mr. Borson, you do not blame him. 

_ THE WEDDING OF THE DECADE: American Millionaire Anthony E. Stark to Wed Miss Virginia Potts…. Beautiful Natasha Romanova, Russian Ballerina Who Took London by Storm, Rumored to be Engaged in Espionage…. International Archery Champion declared: Mr. Clinton Barton…. Buy Banner’s Hulking pills, guaranteed to build muscle…. _

“Might I have your opinion on a literary matter?” Loki asks. You look up to see him bending over you, a small book of French poetry in his hands. He has gained energy since he left the dining room with Thornton; he is restlessly rubbing the edge of the book’s cover.

“Of course.” 

He sits beside you and opens the book to a poem in which a lover is shaking with the anxiety of waiting for his beloved to tell him if she returns his affections. Small notes are written in the margin. Loki points to one of them, his arm brushing against yours. “You’ve studied French...is that a faithful translation? Or would “impertinence” be more accurate than “liberty?” 

He has written in such small letters that you can scarcely read them:  _ If you wish to escape under my protection, meet me in the chapel at midnight _ .  _ Pack lightly _ .

Your heart leaps in your chest. “Yes,” you promise quietly, eyes on the page. “It is an entirely faithful translation.” If you look at him you fear too much hope will fill your face and incur Mr. Borson’s suspicion, so you simply touch his hand under cover of pointing at another note. “But that word should be rendered as ‘trust,’ not simply ‘reliance.’ Will you excuse me? I have a headache, and wish to lie down.”

“I hope you will soon recover,” Loki says courteously. He drops the book into his waistcoat pocket and helps you rise, and then bows with a faint smile that does not betray his knowledge that you are about to go pack for your escape. You curtsy, excuse yourself to Mr. Borson and Aunt Freda--who smiles sweetly at you, and whom you wish you could say goodbye to--and slip out of the room.

Your footsteps are quiet as you cross the dark hall, attempting to believe that you will cross it one more time, to reach the chapel, and then will never cross it again. You have a multitude of questions for Loki--how will you leave? Where will you go? And does he simply mean to take you to safety, or does he--will he propose marriage? Does he wish to?

Despite your weakness and the darkness, you are inclined to run up the stairs, but pause and walk slowly up them. Odom Borson might be watching you. 

….Thornton must be involved in this plan; he has gone into town; he must be the source of your and Loki’s transportation away from here….

The floor creaks under your feet as you slip into your room. You light a candle and fling yourself onto the bed, just in case Mr. Borson is listening, and stay still. It is three hours until midnight; you could have stayed in the sitting room longer, but acting tired and hopeless for two hours while anticipating escape that night would have been close to impossible.

Light flickers off Death and the Maiden. Helena is absent, or silent. Perhaps she is repelled by your hope. You sit up on the bed and wrap your arms around yourself. Loki said he was yours, and you know you wish to spend your life married to him. But does he  _ wish _ to be yours? You twist your shoulders uneasily, trying to think of the best way to ask him whether he truly wishes for your love, rather than only your friendship. 

And the time until midnight trickles on. 

At an hour ‘til midnight you repack your one carpetbag; at a quarter ‘til midnight, wind blowing and persons silent, you creep out of your room, locking it behind you. Stepping as lightly as you may, you walk across the hall’s blood-red carpet, into the dining hall where you ate so recently and uncomfortably. Shadows encompass you. Drapes masquerade as a woman; your fingers clamp on your carpet bag handle.

The hinges of the door into the chapel corridor scream into the darkness. You try to open it slowly and then realize that is making the noise no quieter and much longer, so you shobe it widely enough to slip through and then all but run down the corridor, straining your eyes to scrutinize the floor as you go. You cannot see footprints in the dust; it Loki running late? Or worse?

The chapel is empty and black, the golden case glimmering as faintly as stars when one is holding a lantern, and Helena’s trapdoor--open. The rectangle of her tomb is black as pitch, blacker than if it led to hell--for hell would have infernal firelight. 

Something flaps at the dark opposite end of the chapel, something you cannot see. Fabric moving in the air, for reasons unknown. You freeze, nails shoving into your carbetbag’s handle, expecting Helena’s face to stare at you from the darkness, her skirt billowing around her dead ankles.

Hinges scream as the fabric flaps again, and a thin silhouette towers in front of door into the night that has just opened in the chapel wall. Questioningly, Loki whispers your name.

Warmth fills your face and heart. “I’m here.” Eyes fixed on Loki and the night behind him, you hurry past Helena’s tomb and the altar. 

“Did he notice your departure?” Loki whispers, reaching behind him and pushing the door back until it is only an inch open. Wind whistles into the chapel. 

You shake your head. “No. At least, I heard nobody moving.”

Loki’s hands find yours, and he takes your carpetbag. “And you are certain you wish to leave in my company?” he whispers, so urgently that you know it is not a rhetorical question.

“Absolutely certain,” you confirm. You take a step close to him, looking up at him even though it is so dark you cannot see his expression. “I trust you, Loki.” How can he possibly think you would feel safer in Odom Borson’s house than under his protection? Particularly after your confession of love?

He nods. “Thornton believes we are eloping; he has pledged to send a carriage from town for us, a carriage that will take us to the port of Scarborough. It ought to arrive at any moment. Shall we sit?”

If the altar were not an altar, it would be the natural place to sit; but it is an altar, and so you both automatically sit on the floor, your backs against the cold wall. Loki sits closer to the door, blocking the draft from you. 

“Where will we go after Scarborough?” you ask, folding your hands on your lap.

“Calais--we can discuss where next on the ship over. And send letters to the English authorities from that port, notifying them of Mr. Borson’s crimes.” Loki shifts position, but moves no closer to you. “They will not care, but--”

“At least we will have tried,” you finish. You wonder if he has bade Aunt Freda farewell; you plan to send her a letter thanking her for all her kindness once you and Loki are far away from her husband.

A few silent minutes pass, both of you wondering what the other desires but not asking. You almost wish you had not confessed your love to him--but not quite.

“My mother has a cousin who married a Frenchman, a kind woman,” Loki says rather suddenly. “If you...spoke more warmly than you felt, earlier today, I will leave you in her protection--your honor as unscathed as if I were your brother. She will help you find respectable employment.” 

“Thank you for taking so much thought,” you murmur. You gather your courage. “But I did not speak more warmly than I felt, but if you do not return--I know it was against convention for me to confess my love to you. Please reject it if you do not--” You realize in your anxiety you are speaking above a whisper, though quietly, and lower your voice-- “if you do not return it.”

The tapestry billows against the wall. 

You hear Loki set down your carpetbag, and then he is kneeling beside you, holding your hands in his. “I began to love you when you came for your shawl and guessed my name,” he whispers, so much affection in his tone that you cease fearing he does not want your love. “You deserve a far better match--unsullied by madness and infamy--but my heart is in your hands. Will you be my wife?” 

“Yes,” you whisper. “Yes. But I cannot deserve better than you--nobody could better you in bravery, or kindness, or loyalty--” 

Loki releases your hands and you feel a soft touch on your arm, and then on your shoulder, and then his hands are cradling your face and his lips are on yours. You tenderly return his kisses, after a moment rising to your knees so you can put your arms around him and hold him close.

Hooves crush into snow and clop onto gelid ground beyond the chapel’s exterior door, and axles creak. Loki helps you to your feet and softly pulls the door inward, letting in a gust of winter. Outside stands a carriage pulled by a dapple-grey horse, vapor blasting from its nostrils.

“After you, my love,” Loki whispers. “Go quickly.” He bends for your bag and follows closely behind you, as if he is shielding you from the house and the ghost and the murderer in it, as you step onto the hard ground. Wind rips your hair out of your bun and makes the coachman’s cloak flare as he climbs down.

A gunshot cracks the air behind you. 


	17. Chapter XVII

You pivot to look back, tension rushing through your body. Odom Borson stands in the open doorway, an oil lamp raised in his left hand--drops of oil falling from it and glinting in the light--and a pistol in his right.

Loki flies toward you--a shot snaps out--Loki is on top of you and he cold ground is under you and liquid that is not cold at all is dripping from Loki’s arm or shoulder and onto your neck and the horse and carriage are galloping away with the horse whinnying and the coachman bellowing.

“Loki!” you gasp. He’s shot and bleeding and you must get him away from Mr. Borson, you must get away now--

Loki lurches to his feet, hastily pulling you up. “Run--you know too much--I’ll keep his attention,” he orders, and staggers back towards the chapel door, a bullet whistling past both of you.

Loki would be shot and dead before you could fetch Aunt Freda, and running away, leaving him to die, does not cross your mind, beyond your comprehension that that is what he has told you to do. You run after him, staying in the darkness beside the beam of oil-lamp light. Your carpet bag trip you and you catch it up--if you throw it at Mr. Borson’s head--

“I killed one of my fathers,” Loki says, too calm, too philosophical. “It seems...fitting...that the second will kill me.” Blood oozes down his white sleeve.

“No, Locke.” Mr. Borson’s face is mournful, his tone the gentlest you have heard him use to Loki. “In another fit of madness, after I unwisely liberated you, you killed my wife’s innocent niece and then yourself, after luring her to the chapel for an elopement. I arrived too late to save either of you--as the cabby will testify, after I hint that--”

You hurl the bag at his face with all your strength, and he stumbles backward, almost dropping the lamp. Loki springs after him and catches hold of his wrists. 

They stand facing each other, Loki towering over Odom, Loki’s thin hands clamped around his adoptive father’s wrinkled wrists. It must hurt dreadfully to put that strain on his wounded right arm.

“Go behind him and take his pistol,” Loki tells you, his eyes on Odom’s face. Odom tries to wrench his wrists out of Loki’s hands but cannot, and then before you can dart past him you see his finger on his trigger and the pistol barrel tilt down towards Loki. 

Loki’s eyes widen and he shoves Odom’s hand upward, ducking simultaneously. Odom’s bullet stabs into the plaster ceiling, making white dust fall, and then you are behind him and reach up and rip the hot pistol out of his hand with both of yours. 

Instantly, Odom throws the lamp into Loki’s face. Loki instinctively lets go of him and knocks it away as it flies at him, burning, dripping oil, and it shatters onto the floor beside the dark rectangle of Helena’s tomb--the trapdoor of which is open. 

Flames blaze up between the two men, the oil that is running across the stone floor igniting as quickly as it is gliding. And you are on the same side of the flames as Odom. He rushes toward you, hand raised to seize back his pistol, and you instinctively run, remembering that Helena’s tomb is open between you and Loki only as you are one leap away from the flame-lit rectangle. 

You throw yourself over the tomb, nearly falling as you land on the other side but catching your balance--though not your mental equilibrium. You saw something wrong in the tomb, something so horrible that you look back, down into the base of it. Helena’s broad coffin is open. She lies in the center, a skeleton with black hair massed about its skull--and crammed on either side of her is a rotting corpse, humbly dressed--dressed like a maid. Sickness twists your stomach and then flames flare up from the farther maid’s skirt as fiery oil splatters down into the tomb, and you snap out of your petrification and turn to find Loki beside you, his face as white as bones. He catches hold of your hand and you run together towards the door to outside, looking back at neither the fire nor Odom Borson. A moment after you rush into the cold, smokeless outside air, Loki stumbles and falls to his knees.

You set the pistol down, pull off one of your petticoats from under your skirt--as faint as he is, Loki still bothers to look away--and rip it into long pieces and wrap them as tightly around his bloody sleeve, around and above the bullet wound, as you can. “You need a doctor--you need to be farther from the fire--” you think aloud, and Loki put his hand on your shoulder and manages to stand. 

“Help me a few steps...then run, warn Mother to exit...the servants…” He nearly falls but you steady him. When you are a good five yards away from the chapel door, he all but collapses on a wrought iron bench that sits beside a snow-blanketed, blood-red-caned rosebush. “Go warn Mother.” 

A cough faintly floats toward you on the wind and before you can begin running toward the house you see people running out of it: Aunt Freda, Father Rogers, the cook. “She’s already out, they all are.” You tighten the bandage around his arm. Blood paints your fingers. 

He raises his head, stares at them for a moment, and breathes a sigh of relief. “And Father was near the door into the corridor,” he murmurs, and before you can hold on to him, tumbles off the bench onto the ground. You drop to your knees beside him as Aunt Freda calls, “Locke!” and you hear her running towards you. 

“Mr. Borson shot him, I’ve bandaged it but he’s still bleeding, he needs a doctor,” you blurt, and Aunt Freda falls to her knees beside you, immediately tightening the bandage and then pulling off her dressing gown and ripping the sleeves off to increase the bandaging. Seeing that that is what he needs, more bandages, you begin to pull off another petticoat.

Flames blaze from the chapel window, as if a million candlelight services were being held in it concurrently. 

“No, that won't be needed,” Aunt Freda interposes, speaking far faster than she has ever spoken before. “Ride into town, the doctor lives on Main Street--Oh, dear God!” Her realization is a prayer, not a profanity. “He locked it after Thornton left.”

“Thornton’s returning,” Father Rogers interposes. He begins coughing too heavily--reacting to the smoke that is drifting through the air--to continue talking, but he waves his arm in the direction of town. Yes, a horse is galloping. Thornton appears, riding as if he were racing, staring at the flaming chapel with dismay. 

“Stay with him,” Aunt Freda orders you, and hurries toward Thornton, holding her skirt up in both bloody hands. You ease Loki’s head onto your lap--the ground is cold and hard tonight--and put your hand on his unhurt shoulder, so, if he is conscious at all, he will know you are with him. The blood has not soaked through Aunt Freda’s dressing gown sleeves yet, as far as you can see in firelight and moonlight, and you hope she was right and that was enough binding. 

Wind speeds across the moor, and when you glance at the chapel you see firelight blazing through the corridor windows. The flames are foraying from the chapel into the house, blown by the wind. 

Loki’s eyelids flutter and then open, and he says your name questioningly. 

“I’m with you, my dear,” you reassure him. “Lie still--”

But anxiety fills his eyes and he sits up, shaking, and looks around. “Mother--?”

“She’s safe, she went to meet Thornton--he’ll fetch the doctor. And Father Rogers is safe, and the cook--you must lie down, Loki!” He is trying to stand, and you do not know how to stop him. 

His hands clamp on the back of the bench and he wavers upright, staring at the windows of the corridor. Two of them shatter in unison.

“Father. He hasn’t come out,” Loki whispers, more as a statement than a question.

You shake your head, scrambling to your feet. “But he was directly by the door into the corridor, and it only just caught fire now--he had five or ten minutes in which to escape. He must be gathering valuables in the house.” You are speaking sincerely; it seems utterly impossible that Mr. Borson could be trapped. 

But at that moment a man’s scream--loud and high enough that you are never sure whether the three windows that shattered next, one in the chapel, two in the corridor, shattered because of the heat or because of that scream--rings out, followed by the almost equally loud cacophony of Helena’s laughter. She laughs as if she wants the wind to blow her laughter into town, as if it is the last time she will laugh. 

“No!” Loki’s shout is as pained and horrified as if he had just heard the death-scream of a devoted father rather than of the murderer who imprisoned him, who poisoned you, who shot the bullet that is buried in his arm. And then his eyes widen, his horror flipping into terror. “Thornton! It’s too late!”

Thorton--a moment ago running towards Loki, doubtless about to rush off with him to a doctor--has just crashed head first through a window into the fiery corridor.

Inconceivably, Loki runs. Not in a straight line, but fast, towards the window through which his brother disappeared, ignoring your and Aunt Freda’s shouts for him to stop. You both run to catch up with him, but then he stops of his own accord, crumpling to his knees and then to the ground again.Thornton has all but fallen back out of the window, slapping his flaming hair and coat, his eyes wild. “He’s dead--he’s lying before the door, and it was open. It was open. Three women in it--black smoke, two of white smoke--He burned to death...an open door…” Thornton’s voice fades. Flames dance in the dining room windows. 

You kneel and put your shaking hand over Loki’s heart. It is beating, but blood has come through the sleeves Aunt Freda bound around his wound; he has lost a dreadful amount of blood, and he was already suffering from captivity and underfeeding…. 

“May God have mercy on their souls.” You had not noticed Father Rogers was here, but he must have run to stop Thornton too. He pulls a key out of Thornton’s pocket and speeds off towards the stables, pressing his left hand against his side. 

Aunt Freda finds her voice. “Thornton. Take Locke to the doctor, then send help here.  _ Now _ .” 

Thornton’s eyes focus on Loki and he exclaims, “Jove!” under his breath. Snapped out of his horrified fixation on what he saw in the fiery corridor, he lifts Loki and hastens toward his horse with him. He changes direction as Father Rogers appears, leading the other two nervous horses from the stables. “Take this one, Thornton, she’s not tired,” he says, handing the reins of one to him. Thornton mounts it at once, Loki inert in front of him, and gallops away toward town.

Half the windows in the house disclose fire now, and smoke rises as if each of them were a chimney. Without discussion, everyone walks far enough from it that the wind begins to be cold and invisible again rather than fire-heated and smokey. Father Rogers whispers prayers and tells the horses that all will be well; Aunt Freda stares strickenly, not at the burning house but down the road where her sons rode away. She looks if she has aged ten years in the last quarter-hour. “Mea culpa,” she whispers, and turns to you, her clear eyes wet with tears. “And you, my dear. He poisoned you, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” you say, very gently. “But you couldn’t know that he would.”

She shakes her head, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “I ought to have known.” You take your knitted shawl off and put it around her shoulders, like you would have had your mother been cold, and she pulls you into an embrace, silently weeping.

“God forgives,” Father Rogers says, soft-voiced, to Aunt Freda or to nobody or to God himself, and then, to one of the horses, “Shh, easy now….” 

The blazing house quakes. 


	18. Chapter 18

_ Three months later, the day before your wedding _ .

Gazing out the window at the sunlit moor, Loki sits in the parlor of the cottage Thornton is renting while a new Borson house is built at the other end of the Borson property. On his lap slumbers Thunder, the plump, black, white-moustached and -socked kitten whom Father Rogers, two days before sailing to America, found in the street during a storm, eyes matted shut and weighing two pounds. 

Loki looks towards the door as you walk in and smiles, laugh lines appearing. “I haven’t seen you in  _ six hours _ , my love,” he complains, bantering, and then motions at the kitten on his lap. “Forgive my failure to rise….”

You laugh softly and sit beside him, letting your head rest against his (uninjured) shoulder as he puts his arm around your waist. “I was helping Mother finish furnishing the chapel, so it will be ready for tomorrow.” 

Loki softly kisses your brow. “Is it finished?” 

“Yes, even the crucifix from your room and the tabernacle from the chapel are there. And we have set bouquets of white narcissus in front of the altar, and I shall carry more of them. They’re blooming early..” You scratch behind Thunder’s ears and nestle a little closer to Loki.

He is quiet for a few moments, and then sits up straighter, but still holding you. “The world seems to be in an expeditious mood. I’ve already received a reply from the Honorable Heathcliff Rochester. Would you care to read it, my love?”

“Of course!” Though his tone indicates that he disdains something in the replying letter, it is still fortuitous that it has come before you and Loki leave for the Carpathian Mountains.

Loki pulls the letter from his pocket, and you decipher its bewildering handwriting; most of the words are illegible mermaids, half letters and half squiggle. 

_ Dear Mr. Borson, _

_ _ _ I shall be delighted to direct your legal studies via correspondence, and hope that your years in Transylvania will aid the complete renaissance of your health. Might I hope that you will enter pupillage to me or my partner the Hon. Bram Harker upon your return? _

_ _ _ I would suggest that you reconsider your intention to work exclusively pro bono, however. While I understand--having aided you in the transaction in which you sold your inheritance to Mr. Thornton Borson--that you are independently wealthy, and applaud your wish to aid those unjustly confined, disinherited, et cetera, it is not customary to refuse compensation. Indeed, in conjunction with the annuities you have chosen to pay the families of those who died in the fire at your natural father’s mill, your intention to work pro bono raises serious doubts of your fiscal wisdom.  _

_ Sincerely yours, _

_ Heathcliff Rochester, LL.B., P.C.LL  _

Loki comments sardonically as you return the letter to him, “A fine barrister, if his colleague, law, does not clash with his god, custom! I suspect he would also wish you to reconsider your decision to study with me.”

“But I shall not. Two heads are better than one--and ladies will tell me of sufferings they would deem inappropriate to reveal in mixed company.” Your words are defiant, but only to the Honorable Mr. Rochester’s presumable advice. Loki was and is favorable to your decision to study law and assist him in his planned campaign of justice. 

Loki traces a thorny rose-stem on the settee’s upholstery. “And we shall become the nightmare of all Odom Borson’s ilk,” he murmurs, rage and mourning tinting his soft tone and making you remember him calling Odom Borson “Father” before he burned and remember him weeping feverishly for him at midnight on his funeral day. 

“And the hope of their victims,” you add. Thunder stands up, arches his back, and takes a flying leap onto a chair and then onto the windowsill, where he begins to smack at a fly. “But not today, my love.” You tip your head up and kiss his cheek, which makes him smile and look down at you, soft-eyed. “Today is as warm as May, and it is high time you had some sun and air.” Thanks to underfed captivity and then his wound--which shattered two bones--and then the infection that wound contracted, and the cold weather being unsuitable for an invalid, he has not been outside for more than a few minutes in months. “The trees in the orchard behind the cottage are budding; would you like to walk there?” 

“Yes, that would be delightful.” He stands, perhaps a little too fast for his sense of stability; he remains particularly still for a moment, brushing cat hair off his nether garments. You fetch his hat and overcoat, and put on your shawl and bonnet. 

“Ready, my love?” you ask. But he is still buttoning his overcoat, and winces slightly as he tries to button it at a greater speed. His right arm is still painful to bend, though the fractures have mended. You step towards him. “May I?” 

“Thank you, dearest.” He tries to hide that his arm is still healing and that he becomes tired after climbing stairs, but (with a few exceptions, when he is in a fit of melancholy or of reclusiveness), he lets you aid him if you ask to do so. “Wait,” he says as you straighten from fastening the last button. He slips his arms around you--since his sling came off, he has always embraced you with both arms, though you wish for his sake he would only use the sound one--and kisses you, several times. “Since we shall soon be in the public view,” he explains, with a lopsided smile. You both know that nobody can see the orchard from the neighbors’ houses or the road.

You could not help laughing, even if you wished to. You reach up and tuck a wave of black hair behind his ear, and kiss him one more time. Thunder meows from the windowsill, staring at you with round yellow eyes. “But in here we’re abashing our cat,” you stage-whisper to Loki, and he dissolves into whole-hearted laughter. 

“Then let us leave him in solitude to recover,” he says after he catches his breath. He gives you his left arm, and you slowly walk together out of the cottage’s back door. 

The orchard, growing at the foot of a sunny hill, is lightly shaded, rows of grey apple trees with minuscule bits of green leaves growing out of their buds. Without reaching painfully high, Loki touches their trunks and boughs as you walk past them--the first time, you realize, that he has touched plants, beyond losing consciousness on frozen grass and admiring cut flowers, in several seasons. 

“Let’s ascend the hill,” he says rather suddenly, as he touches the last tree in the row. The hill’s sunniness is alluring, but you bite your lip, looking at its slope. It isn’t steep, but should Loki climb a hill on the same day as his first outdoor stroll? You doubt it, but he is under no medical orders not to ascend slopes, and you suspect from his wistful expression that he has been wanting to climb this hill since before you came home. 

“Let’s.” If he becomes short of breath or unsteady, you will propose sitting down. 

As you walk up it, through the virid grass and yellow dandelions, he does become out of breath, but merely a step or two from the top. He pauses, chest heaving but standing stably, and looks up into the blue sky, eyes tracking a soft white cloud that is more impatient than the clouds inching behind it. “Tell me you won’t secrete all our windows back of four curtains and a valance, dearest,” he says, half jesting and half serious. 

You laugh softly. “We’ll be in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains--we can have no curtains at all, if you fancy that.” You release his arm and lay your shawl flat on the grass--the same shawl you dropped, when you first saw Loki in the darkness beneath the now-ruined house. “Shall we rest before we walk down, my love?” 

Loki lies down beside you after you sit and rests his head on your lap, his breath nearly caught. He smiles at you, his eyes a graver green than the sprouting grass around your shawl, and reaches up to caress your cheek. “Does our future satisfy you?” he asks, a shadow crossing his face. He is not asking this merely to make conversation; anxieties--that you will wish you had married someone above reproach and were not an expatriate with an infamous husband--harry him. 

“Entirely,” you promise, touching the back of his hand. You nestle your cheek against his palm. “A sheet of paper is folded in my writing desk,” you say. “It has every date written on it, from the day your fever broke and your first desire was to schedule our wedding, to—today. And I have never been so impatient to draw a line as I am to draw one through today’s date.” You smooth his dark hair, brushing away a stray dry leaf from dark autumn and winter.

The lines across his forehead have faded as you reassured him; he looks at you as if he almost cannot believe that you are not a loving dream, his thumb tracing your cheekbone, and then the corner of his mouth quirks up. “Our plan of acquiring more cats--I’m not entirely sure it’s feasible,” he says.

You tilt your head quizzically, smiling because his smile is contagious but entirely uncertain how your anticipation for wedding him has led to the topic of cat ownership. “Whyever not?”

He sits up and turns to face you, pretending to be serious, his eyes shining in the sunlight. “Darling, you saw how discomfited Thunder was. How could we inflict such abashment on yet more innocent animals? And I assure you...” His hands take yours, and he leans forward and softly kisses you. “It would be frequent.” 

A blush warms your face. “If it is frequent, will they not grow accustomed to it?” you ask demurely.

Loki smiles, laugh-lines and smile-lines beautifully appearing. “Possibly…. We must give them every opportunity.” 

You rise to your knees and slip your arms around him, pressing a kiss on his temple, and he kneels too and pulls you closer. For a long moment, you embrace, your hands on the sun-warmed back of his overcoat, his face buried against your hair. 

One of his arms, the healing one, trembles just a little. “We should walk home,” you murmur, letting go of him but putting your hand in his. 

Barely wavering, Loki rises and looks at you with a smile. “Because you have a line to draw, my dearest?” 

You laugh softly, shaking your head, and walk down the hill with him, trying not to tread on dandelions. “Yes, and because Mother and Thornton will be wondering where we are, and because we cannot leave Thunder without an apology after discombobulating him….”

Loki laughs joyously and laces his fingers with yours. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reader, you married him! 
> 
> Thank you all for reading this and for commenting so kindly! <3 
> 
> For this chapter, credit to the following sources: https://www.quora.com/In-the-Victorian-era-how-did-one-become-a-barrister-or-solicitor-Were-they-all-privately-trained-by-people-who-already-had-been-called-to-the-bar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania


End file.
